Some intents of this Wal-Mart blog

Make no mistake -- from reading an entire page of entries, it's pretty easy to determine that Wal-Mart's Checkout Blog is intended to generally pump products on the shelves and get teasers out into the web so that customers can be guided towards buying products they don't know they need (or do know). For example, a Wal-Mart blogger posted this week on an Acer PC laptop to go on sale tomorrow (Sunday) that contained 2GB of memory and was priced right under $500, it was claimed as "what I think is a first" -- meaning the competition had not yet offered a loaded laptop like this for under $500.

The model is mentioned in the blog entry, as is the availability date. There's your PR ad for the product if I've ever seen it. This is a good move by Wal-Mart though, as giving some official hints to what may be coming to the shelves soon gets customers engaged and anxious to buy. In a down economy, that's no mean feat.

Reading through some of the other entries gives one the feel that most of this blog's purpose is to give customers unfiltered (yet promotional) opinion and notification of certain products found or about to be found on Wal-Mart's shelves. It's like a live-running PR piece. Customers can leave comments -- just like a regular blog -- and interact with the bloggers this way.

Some of the more fascinating insight

Although I've already said that Wal-Mart's blog is more like a positive PR piece than anything, there are many entries where the blogger is chastising vendors and products within its stores. One of the more funny ones gives Microsoft Corp.'s (NASDAQ: MSFT) Windows Vista a good tongue lashing, stating this about the world's largest software company's popular computer operating system: "Is it really all that and a bag of chips? My life has not changed dramatically -- well, for that matter, it hasn't changed at all."

Since Wal-Mart is one of Microsoft's largest customers (due to the number of PCs it sells), that doesn't help all that much. At the same time, it doesn't hurt that much either since Wal-Mart doesn't offer any other Microsoft operating system on the computers it sells. However, it does offer several models of computers with the free Linux operating system installed as a competitor to Microsoft's Windows Vista.

Another blogger slammed a certain Star Wars movie as a "debacle," even though the retailer still carries it on store shelves. It's actually quite refreshing to hear such open opinion coming from the mouth of a regular joe -- not some filtered marketing or PR hack that generally gets to dominate much of the company line. And customers take notice -- they can smell BS a mile away (well, many of them) and know when they're being fed lies and untruths. In fact, I coin much of marketing as "the art of BS" since sellers of products and services sometimes will say or do anything to get a customer buying.

Why this is good for Wal-Mart

The age of consumers not having any empowerment over the information about the products and services they buy and rely on every day is over -- has been for a while now. The internet has allowed information -- uncensored and unvarnished information -- to flow freely from one customer to the next instantly and globally. The old guard of protective marketing and PR spin is going extinct and the customer is in charge now.

Companies and retailers with progressive agendas will win loyalty and respect when they're open and honest about things. Not every company is perfect and there are constant mistakes. Tell that to a global company a few decades ago and you'd get a response like "at least our customers don't know." Not anymore -- every company is under the microscope 24 hours a day, and when something happens of significance, the web will alert anybody who cares.

If Wal-Mart continues this blog and lets the employees who count more to the customer write without restraint, then it may have a new-found respect in some customer circles for being so open about the qualities of what on those shelves and what products may really be game-changers (like the Nintendo Wii gaming system) and what products really appear to have little to no value to the average consumer (like Microsoft's Windows Vista).

So, keep it up, Wal-Mart -- I'll be monitoring this blog regularly and it will be interesting to see what develops in 2008. The writers you have populating the content seem to be right for the part. Sure, there's a little self-promotion in some of those posts (to be expected), but all in all, it's a good running start to giving your customers information they just won't find in a call-out box in a weekly color flyer.

Stay right here at this time next week for another edition of The Wal-Mart Weekly. Until then, have a great weekend!