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Lesson #1 -- if you're going to blog, it needs to be original content with expressive opinion backed with facts (as good as the "facts" can be) and with a hint and twist of personality ribboned throughout the content like a holiday present's bow. What a blog can't be, is a corporate mouthpiece with an oh-so-obvious agenda (or maybe not that obvious) that serves as a marketing platform for a service, product or company. That's misrepresentation and most consumers can see through that kind of presentation. But, PR craftiness is sometimes equally acute as an informed readership and can play hide and seek just as well as anyone.

Ah-ha -- but there's the crunch! There is now a world of support personnel ready to dissect things to expose goofiness and semi un-truths to, well, the world at large. This is precisely what happened recently with global retailer Wal-Mart Stores Inc (NYSE: Wmt) as it apparently had one of its PR firms, Edelman, create a "blog" with an imaginary couple traveling across the U.S. by RV, telling tales of life on the road and inside the RV -- with an intertwined support for Wal-Mart in their travels.

The blog, however, was fake, and it's now being called a "flog" (fake blog). As blogs have become an important communication tool for consumers and businesses alike, less and less bias is injected into them compared to heavily-influenced mainstream media, as, gasp, ordinary people can have extraordinary voices in the daily life of Earth instead of a few media elite. That's a paradigm shift if I've ever seen one.

The Wal-Mart episode and embarrassment, detailed here, should serve as a reminder for companies that being exposed to something like this -- and it will happen in most cases -- only serves to devalue the nature of what you're doing. The audience that will pick at every detail is now global and available 24/7. That's the type of scrutiny waiting down there for these "flogs", but perhaps some PR firms just didn't get the memo.

Wal-Mart blog fiasco -- a lesson for retailers on ethics originally appeared on BloggingStocks on Mon, 16 Oct 2006 12:17:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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