Wal-Mart Stores (NYSE: WMT) is in need of an image makeover in 2007 more than any other company -- in any industry -- in recent memory. Although the retailer has made strides in promoting "green" ecologically sound strategies with its stores and with some of the products it carries, the critics of the world's largest retailer have had much more success beating the company down than the company has had promoting what is good for customers along with rebuilding an image since publicly stating the "happy face" logo that went through the store cutting prices would go away. What is Wal-Mart's image these days? Hard to state, as I think it's in limbo waiting for the right strategy to take hold.

Wal-Mart's Edelman-staffed "Action Alley" scrutinizes Wal-Mart's "reputation management" to try and consistently combat the retailer's foes these days. Watchdog groups, consumer advocates, importing experts, economic pundits and even environmental outfits are always on the prowl to ensure the world knows the "other side" of Wal-Mart that results in the "Always Low Prices" its stores have. Those prices, according to many, come at a much larger global cost when all details are looked at as a whole.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE:WMT) has retained PR operation Edelman [subscription required] in another sign that the retailer is focusing on form over substance. The public relations firm is using employees who have helped in political campaigns to run something called "Candidate Wal-Mart."

Wal-Mart is guessing that if it improves its image with the public then sales might go up. Bad feelings about putting small retailers out of business and pushing around employees must be the fall guy for the company's dropping same-store sales.

The PR operation even helped turn the Wal-Mart launch of $4 prescriptions into a campaign claiming the retailer is a force behind promoting health-care changes and, of course, lowering health-care costs.

Today, The Wall Street Journal has"outed" Wal-Mart's fancy campaign to win over the press and consumers. Now the troubling question arises as to whether people don't shop at Wal-Mart because they don't like the company or because they don't think the stores have the products they want at the price they want.

Maybe if Wal-Mart would put the kind of effort that it appears to be putting into burnishing its image into merchandising instead, the financial health of the company might actually improve. The disclosure in the Wall Street Journal article probably offsets any progress from the PR work.

Douglas McIntyre is a partner at 24/7 Wall St.

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.

As long as I've been surfing eBay, I've been in on the dirty little not-so-secret that many of you share: typos are the way to go if you want to save money. There's even a search engine devoted to it.

I'm not the only former spelling bee champ exploiting the less fortoonat. Google makes money on typos too, by selling ads that appear on sites like nyrimes.com, ebbay.com, and OPB.com. Google insists that it's in the clear legally - after all, no one is confused, thinking that "OPB.com" really is Oregon Public Broadcasting's non-profit news site when it he arrives at the ad-filled site.

Sure. We know. None of us are total, complete dolts, no matter how poor our spelling or slippery our keyboard. But what we do know is that this seems a bit underhanded. And profiting from that? Harvard researcher Ben Edelman says that seems to fly in the face of their motto: "Do no evil," in this Washington Post article [registration required].

More evidence that Google's the next evil empire. Stay tuned...