When A Blogger Meets Public Relations

fermion writes "The New York Times is running a story on the evolving relationship between PR departments and bloggers, specifically between the Wal*Mart PR people and sympathetic bloggers. The interesting thing in this story is not so much the astroturfing, which is old news, but the transformation of blogging from a personal statement to a corporate bullhorn. The bloggers mentioned in the story, who presumably are able to articulate their own opinions, received Wal*Mart email and began to simply copy the PR text into the blogs. What is the use of a blog if bloggers are just going to copy sentences and sentiments from the puppetmaster's email?"

Nothing new

The bloggers mentioned in the story, who presumably are able to articulate their own opinions, received Wal*Mart email and began to simply copy the PR text into the blogs.

Wait, I don't understand. This is news? I thought it was common knowledge that a large portion of bloggers (the majority?) simply copy text from elsewhere as their "blog". Take Digg [digg.com] as an example. Digg integrates with many blogging services, allowing users to write commentary on the story, and link back to the Digg page from their blog. The feature is quite popular as most of the front page stories have a "blog" attached to them.

Now with such a feature, you would expect each blogger to provide insightful commentary on the issue at hand, right? Wrong. The majority of the blogs do nothing more than replicate the exact text from the Digg story. Not only are these blogs redundant, but they add another level of indirection to anyone who might happen upon them. ("Oh, so I go from blog, to Digg, to Link, right?") Ok, so the better blogs have a direct link AND a Digg link. But this is really nothing more than sydication of rather fluffy content.

Here's a few examples of what I'm talking about:

http://nik-hil.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com]
http://www.r00tware.com/ [r00tware.com]
http://hackerslife.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com]
http://www.petesblog.com/ [petesblog.com]

These are examples of "real" blogs with sydicated Digg content mixed in:

http://jacobsonster.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com]
http://howgoodisthis.wordpress.com/ [wordpress.com]

Now these blogs aren't entirely without value. In many cases, it's a way of aligning your tastes with those of a particular blogger. i.e. That blogger only links to articles you want to know about. It's also good for the site that's being Dugg, as they have more links to their site.

But no, there's nothing magically articulate about bloggers. Plenty of them are happy to syndicate.

Re:Nothing new

Digg has a feature called "blog" this that just copies the blog summary to your blog verbatim. It makes it very easy todo what these guys are doing.

What is the use?

What is the use of a blog if bloggers are just going to copy sentences and sentiments from the puppetmaster's email?

What is the use of a newspaper that just reports government press releases almost verbatim?
What is the use of a television channel if it copies its programming from somewhere else?
What is the use of a boy band just like every other boy band?

The mainstream media and blogs are beginning to watch over each other reciprocally. This is a good thing. It means that if either lies or fucks up, the other pounces down its throat.

Three (tentative) cheers for a free press?

Just don't believe everything you read!

People still tend to want to believe anything they read, but they shouldn't and routinely need to be reminded of that fact. Most importantly, people need to either accept what they read from various sources may not be true or accurate and be open to opposing information at any time, or learn to do their own fact checking and not accept anything as fact until fact checking confirms information.

Only those who are already skeptical will do that... the rest of us are simply too lazy.

Wait a damn minute...

Some people are "sympathetic" to Wal*Mart???

I'm sympathetic to wounded puppies, starving people, oppressed subcultures, the sick, the dying, abused children, and so on.. but multinational corporations are just not something I can rouse the neccessary emotional response to sympathise with.

Re:Wait a damn minute...

but multinational corporations are just not something I can rouse the neccessary emotional response to sympathise with.

I hate Walmart, or, rather, I hate Walmart management. They're terrible community citizens -- in fact, if Walmart was a person, it'd have been in and out of jail for most of its life due to a habitual tendancy for vandalizm and assault.

Also, I agree with you -- corporations are *not* living entities. I sympathize with my television more than I sympathize with any corporation.

That said, I think that most people who feel sympathy with the company are really feeling sympathy with:

• Their own pocket book ("Walmart has great prices! One stop shopping!")
• They are feeling sympathetic to all of the people that Walmart employs, who might not have jobs otherwise

The main problem with the humanist sympathizers is that they're entirely ignorant about, or they choose to ignore, how shitty Walmart treats the people who work for it. It is similar to justifying sweat-shops by saying that the people are better off being raped than they are starving. The fact that often gets ignored is that these aren't non-profit organizations. There are plenty of fat (figuratively) fucks at the top who are getting rich while they figure out new ways of screwing their employees out of benefits.

Despite the rant, I do think that there are people who are simply ignorant, and do believe that Walmart is a good thing for the jobs it brings into communities.

--- SER

Been there, Done that

We all know that "journalists" do this all the time. They quote from PR releases, and use video footage in their news reports.

Why shouldn't bloggers do this as well?

Pot, kettle, etc.

Fascinating that a newspaper would run such a story, considering the huge numbers of newpaper articles that are barely rewritten press releases from special interest groups and politicians.

Always low prices...thanks to your tax dollars

Wal-Mart was found out to be exploiting [infozine.com] the US taxpayer by not providing adequate health benefits to its employees. How did they do this? They simply printed out instructions (in Spanish and English) to direct their employees to the nearest free clinic in the area.

Illegal? Maybe. Unethical?

Now that you know how they dodge their health costs, you can enjoy an article about the richest Americans. Five of the Richest Americans [forbes.com] are Wal-Mart's owners and relatives of owners.
Maybe we should ask the Waltons how they feel about exploiting US Taxpayers?
Blogs that just repeat Wal-Mart PR, are not blogs, they are PR for Wal-Mart. This is done order to help continue their ways of exploiting their workers and the system.

Lies, damn lies, and statistics...

I am not replying to be a Wal-Mart appologist, this is just a little exercise in analysis of a random "+5 Insightful Whine" post...

Wal-Mart has a lot of employees (1.7 Million). It is a BIG company. Everything else follows from there.

The full-timers do have insurance. But there many are part-timers who do not, just like many other businesses. Seems to me, giving instructions for finding free clinics is more of a public service for those employees who need it than an exploitive scheme. Do other companies tell their non-covered employees about free clinics?

You might as well say Poor people exploit the taxpayer by using government services .

Exploiting the US Taxpayer Did you know that Wal-Mart has 1500 International stores (3600 US)? Does Wal-Mart exploite the taxpayes of these other countries too?

How does Wal-Mart compare to any large employer? How much health care does McDonalds provide for part-time employees? How about Starbucks - they have lots of part-timers.

I don't know what all this hatred of WMT is, of late. What's the difference between a valid business model and an evil scheme? I guess it has to do with how big you are. At the end of the day, I think it all comes down to the fact that WMT has money and other people want to get at it because it is there.

Let's check that last one... Is Wal-Mart making "obscene" amounts of money? WMT [yahoo.com]

Profit margin: 3.6% - Doesn't look obscene to me, Sure it is billions of dollars. MCD makes 12.7% and so does PEP. TGT (Target) makes 4.58% - maybe they exploit their workers even more to squeeze that extra 1% profit out of them.

Traditional media do the same thing...

"What is the use of a blog if bloggers are just going to copy sentences and sentiments from the puppetmaster's email?"

Traditional media, including newspapers, magazines and especially the local TV news do the same thing every day.

Ditto

The bloggers mentioned in the story, who presumably are able to articulate their own opinions, received Wal*Mart email and began to simply copy the PR text into the blogs. What is the use of a blog if bloggers are just going to copy sentences and sentiments from the puppetmaster's email?

I couldn't agree more.

Key blogger's response

Duncan Black over at Eschaton [blogspot.com] (one of the most-read political blogs) had a good take on this: [blogspot.com]

Unless I'm missing something this New York Times article is just another stab at holding bloggers to ethical standards and practices which don't apply anywhere else in the universe. The public relations industry existed long before bloggers came along and they had reporters' phone numbers long before they had the email addresses of bloggers. Barely edited press releases have long been published, especially at smaller newspapers. I get press releases and information from all over the place all the time. Obviously disclosure is a nice idea if there are any financial relationships, a practice not always followed by our hallowed 4th estate, but if people want to devote their blogs to throwing up Wal Mart press releases they're free.

The main reason stories like this are even written is that contrary to popular opinnion the internet often provides a lot more transparency even when there are efforts to hide it. Astroturfing operations of various kinds through all media are nothing new, they're just usually harder to track. If Wal Mart pays 50 people to call talk radio all day and extol its virtues would anyone know?

I'm not defending all astro turfing practices or its practitioners, and there are certainly ethical issues that can be raised. But "Wal Mart PR guy reaches out to bloggers" just isn't much of a story. PR people reach out to me all the time. So what.

There's a more important issue than that.

The real question is "What is the use of a blog if bloggers are just going to copy sentences and sentiments from the puppetmaster's email?"

Start the spin cycle.

This is great. The New York Times along with most of the press don't like blogs. So they write about bloggers that post positive material about Walmart. Walmart which is one of the current targets of dislike by many in the online community. And what are these evil bloggers doing? Posting emails sent to them by Walmart.
If a blogger was posting emails sent to them by Planned Parenthood, Amnesty International, Whole Foods, Ben and Jerry's, or Greenpeace would it get any attention? Would they have any less credibility?
I rarely shop at Walmart not because they are EVIL but because I don't like a lot of what they carry and the lines and parking are just not worth it. Yes there are other stores that provide better service, products, and or selections for not much more money. Those stores seem to be doing fine in my city.
This is a great piece of spin and it looks as if many have fallen for it hook, line, and sinker.

All the News That's Fit to Invoice

This story is most significant as Washington DC decides whether to protect the free speech of bloggers, as the First Amendment requires, as completely as it protects the rights of mass media, like cable TV news. The mass media lobbies DC with scare stories about corporations paying bloggers to publish pure PR, as opposed to the "responsible, independent, researched journalism" from the mass media that the law currently protects. The idea is to protect a privileged class of journalists, the corporate mass media, but not the unprivileged interactive media, like bloggers.

Of course, the corporate media's entire business model is taking corporate money and publishing their PR, even if carefully cooked to provide harmless (or occasionally stress-releasing) corporate PR.

This just in....

Text posted on the internet might not be completely legitimate or factual.

Film at 11.

So blogs are unreliable

This is news?

The whole point of unregulated speech is that people are free to abuse it. Some will be trolls, some will be corporate shills, some will be flat-out wackos, and almost all of them will be biased as hell. For all the crap some Slashdotters like to talk about bloggers being 'journalists', there's no set of standards or ethics that bloggers are required -- or even expected -- to obey.

When people decide to turn off their critical thinking skills and just accept whatever they read on some blog they've never seen before, they're stupid. End of story. Making a big deal out of the fact that bloggers don't self-organize into an ethical and reliable news system is equally stupid. Both these principles fall on the 'obvious' scale somewhere near, "hey look: air."

Comments from the blogger

The guy extensively quoted in the NYT piece chimes in with his two cents here [iowavoice.com] - good reading IF you want to hear the their side of the story.

Well...

What is the use of a blog, period? Does anybody actually read these damn things?

I gather there's a guy by the name of CmdrTaco whose blog has a pretty impressive readership. Always some interesting reader commentary following every article, too... I'd link to it, but I forget the url.