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When A Blogger Meets Public Relations

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the protons-and-anti-protons dept.

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?"

8 of 193 comments (clear)

  1. What is the use? by Eli+Gottlieb · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

  2. Just don't believe everything you read! by erroneus · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  3. Wait a damn minute... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Wait a damn minute... by srussell · · Score: 3, Insightful
      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

  4. Been there, Done that by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?

  5. Pot, kettle, etc. by amliebsch · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
  6. Always low prices...thanks to your tax dollars by digitaldc · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Wal-Mart was found out to be exploiting 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 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.

    --
    He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
  7. the collage effect by barutanseijin · · Score: 3, Insightful
    I'm a little skeptical about blogging myself, and like you say, much/most of it isn't terribly original. However, I think that if there is some value to blogging, it probably comes from the selection and arrangement of the texts that bloggers choose.

    It's like a collage. The material within a collage comes from elsewhere and is "simply" pasted in, yet the overall effect is something greater than the mechanically reproduced parts. The problem here seems to be that Walmart are choosing the texts more than the bloggers, and with the bloggers slapping in great slabs of Walmart PR copy, there isn't a whole lot to differentiate these blogs from Walmart propaganda.

    Unfortunately, there isn't any magic formula that can give us a 100% definitive answer about whether a blog is just propaganda or an interesting collation of texts gleaned from elsewhere. You have to look at them, read them, and decide for yourself.