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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?"
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 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/
http://www.r00tware.com/
http://hackerslife.blogspot.com/
http://www.petesblog.com/
These are examples of "real" blogs with sydicated Digg content mixed in:
http://jacobsonster.blogspot.com/
http://howgoodisthis.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.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
I couldn't agree more.
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
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.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.