|
Home | Flogs
Walmart's Travel Flog
 BusinessWeek reports how a blog about two people RVing from Las Vegas to Georgia has turned out to be a fakish blog called Walmarting Across America. The blog was backed by Wal-Mart and its PR firm Edelman. The Walmarting RV parked at Wal-Mart stores and the bloggers took photographs of ever-happy Wal-Mart employees.
Every Wal-Mart employee that Laura and Jim run into, from store clerks to photogenic executives, absolutely loves to work at the store. Sound like a great Wal-Mart publicity campaign? Anyone familiar with Wal-Mart and its reputation for being quite stingy with wages and benefits will roll their eyes at such a rosy picture. In fact, some critics are so skeptical that they wonder whether Jim and Laura are real or whether they were concocted at the company's headquarters in Bentonville, Ark.
"Wal-Mart has hired fake people," says Jonathan Rees, a labor historian and associate professor at Colorado State University at Pueblo, who has also worked as a staff researcher at the AFL-CIO. In a blog posting for the Web site The Writing On the Wal, Reese published an open letter to Laura and Jim challenging them to reveal themselves and asking who paid for their RV and gas.
It turns out that the blog was sponsored by Working Families for Wal-Mart, an organization launched by Edelman. Deep Jive Interests explains.
In spite of the ever growing echochamber the blogosphere lives in, it never astounds me what gets missed from time to time; in particular, there's a leading story in Businessweek about how a travel blog about Wal-mart (that is unabashedly positive about Wal-Mart), has in fact been sponsored by Working Families for Wal-Mart. What's wrong with that? Well, it turns out that WFWM is an organization that was launched by Edelman about 10 months ago, as a PR move to counter negative press about Wal-Mart.
Deep Jive Interests also notes that Edelman and Wal-Mart have generated unfavorable blogosphere buzz before -- see here and here. In Edelman's defense at least they didn't launch that horrid social network for Walmart.com.
Robert Scoble writes that blog integrity is important and relates the Wal-Mart RV blog incident to PayPerPost allowing bloggers to get paid for blog posts without disclosing it.
Shel Holtz wants to know where the Edelman bloggers are? "So where is Edelman in this particular conversation? Missing in action. As dismaying as this latest misstep is, it's even more dismaying to see Edelman's high-powered social media experts failing to walk the talk. Nothing from Richard in his vaunted 6 a.m. blog. Nothing from Steve, who blogs at the pinnacle of PR's A-list."
The final word from the Walmarting Across America blog blames the anti-Walmart crowd, as Mathew Ingram notes. The Walmarting Across America bloggers are also steadfast in their love of Wal-Mart.
Even these personal attacks won't sour my feelings about Wal-Mart. I've met too many great people in Wal-Marts across the county. I've met too many people - real people, not imaginary Internet people - who've told me about all the good Wal-Mart has done. I've camped in Wal-Mart parking lots. I've met these people and heard their stories firsthand. Which is something the people who attacked Jim and me haven't done and don't care to do.
So I've made the trip. I had a great time. I loved meeting the people we met, listening to the stories we heard. After everything that's happened, I even loved blogging about it all. And if I had the chance, I'd do it again.
In the end, that's all that really matters.
AdPulp reports that the photographer of the flog, who also works for the Washington Post, is in trouble because the Wal-Mart photographs violate his freelancing policy with the Post. The other problem with the blog is there are not many links to it from other blogs and some of the inbound links are just bloggers complaining about it. There must not have been much interest in watching people travel from one Wal-Mart to another.
Update 10-17-06: Edelman admits to "failing to be transparent about the identity of the two bloggers from the outset." Edelman will also continue to support the WOMMA transparency guidelines they helped write. A-list blogger and Edelman employee Steve Rubel was not personally involved in the Walmarting blog.
Posted on October 15, 2006
Permalink | | | Comments (View)
| |
Bloggers Despise Fake Coke Zero Blog
The Age has an article about the Coke Zero campaign which included a Zero Movement website. The site contained a fake blog that was designed to look like it was written by an real person. The blog did not have the Coke bottle images and Coke branding that can be found on the current version of the site. The fake blog has come under fire from a number of blogs, especially advertising and marketing blogs.
The zero movement website features a manifesto, downloads of its branding material, and blog-type entries on topics that pose wistful questions like: "Why can't every weekend be long?" and "why can't I still get toys for Christmas?"
Although the goal was to tease the market and create some buzz among the web-savvy "neos" in the twenty something age-bracket, the blogging community has issued its own verdict.
Those searching out blogger commentary on the zero movement are likely to find posts along the lines of: "How many ad agencies does it take to patronise a demographic?"
Some of the blogger outrage can be found at: Adrants.com, Blogebrity, Digital Influence Mapping Project, ChaosScenario, AdPulp and Sbordage.com. A blog mocking the Coke Zero blog called The Zero Movement Sucks has also appeared.
If you want to go fake you are better off with a character blog. Most bloggers don't like character blogs either but they aren't attacked quite as viciously as fake person blogs. Adjab and Armchair Media explain why blogs like the Coke Zero blog are lame. Overall, the Coke Zero blog only has 31 inbound links from Technorati so apart from being linked to by blogs that hate it there was little interest in the blog overall.
Posted on January 26, 2006
Permalink | | | Comments (View)
| |
Do Bloggers Really Use Blogging Terms?
Wikipedia has a page
here about blogging terms. It says these terms
are a "few of the more common phrases and words." But it turns out
this isn't the case with a few of the words that are hardly used at all.
Blogger, Audioblog, blog client, blog feed, BlogDay, blogroll, blogosphere,
blogsite, comment spam, dark blog, moblog, multi-blog, multi-blogger,
permalink, photoblog, ping, podcasting, rss aggregator, rss feed, splog, trackback, troll are all commonly used or obvious so we won't discuss them.
Here is a closer look at some of the other words on Wikipedia's
list of blogging terms:
Autocasting: "Automated form of podcasting that allows bloggers and blog readers to generate audio versions of text blogs from RSS feeds."
-- Technorati shows just 42 results. BlogPulse has 37.
Blam: "A blog which contains nothing but advertising or marketing - often generated mechanically. BLAM is analogous to SPAM or SPIM."
-- Technorati shows over 4,000 results but most are not for the above meaning. It has been replaced or outshined by the more frequently used term "splog."
Bleg: "A blog entry consisting of a request to the readers, such as for information or contributions. A portmanteau of 'blog' and 'beg'."
-- Technorati shows 705 results and BlogPulse has 837 results. Surprisingly, bloggers are making good use of this term.
Blog hopping: "to follow links from one blog entry to another, with related side-trips to various articles, sites, discussion forums, and more."
Bloggers are blog hopping. BlogPulse lists over 1,200 results.
Blogorrhea: "A portmanteau of 'blog' and 'logorrhea', meaning excessive and/or incoherent talkativeness in a weblog."
-- 448 results on Technorati. Gawker uses it in their Blogorrhea NYC posts.
Blogsnob: "A person who refuses to respond to comments on their blog from
people outside their circle of friends."
-- There are a few blogsnobs. Technorati shows 128 blogsnob results and BlogPulse has 146.
Blogstorm: "When a large amount of activity, information and opinion erupts around a particular subject or controversy in the blogosphere, it is sometimes called a blogstorm or blog swarm."
-- Technorati shows 332 results and BlogPulse has indexed 252 blogstorm posts. Blogstorm is a good word that is not used as often as it probably should be.
Blogstream: "A play on the term mainstream that references the alternative news and information network growing up around weblogs and user driven content mechanisms. Can also be used as a play on the phrase 'thought-stream', referring to the stream of conciousness as exprssed through a weblog."
-- Blogstream is quite popular: 1,900 results on Technorati.
Dark Blog: "A non-public blog (e.g. behind a firewall)"
-- This is not a popular term. We once posted about it. Technorati has 172 results.
Flog: "A portmanteau of 'fake' and 'blog'. A blog that's ghostwritten by someone, such as in the marketing department."
-- There was more talk of flogs back during the days of the Lincoln Fry blog but flog isn't used much anymore. Bloggers are actively using the term "flog" with over 6,000 results on Technorati but they are using it for a variety of other reasons and not to refer to fake blogs. A few results for flog as a "fake blog" here but most are from over 200 days ago. Most bloggers are just calling them "fake blogs" and not using flog or flogs.
Shocklog: "Weblogs to produce shocking discussions by posting various
shocking content."
-- Technorati shows just two results for shocklog. BlogPulse has just eleven.
Vorage: "A marriage between the words forage and video defined as 'The act of foraging for video on the internet and sharing it with others.'"
-- Hardly anyone is using this boring term. Zero results on Technorati and six on BlogPulse.
Words and phrases like adverblog, celeblog and blog network are all used more frequently than some of the terms above. It looks like the Wikipedia's list of blogging terms could use an update. Other lists of blogging terms can be found here, here and here.
Posted on December 4, 2005
Permalink | | | Comments (View)
| |
Infosential Launches Flogs Wiki
Infosential, a weblog written by technology consultants Tim Duckett and
Wayne Robinson, has started a website about flogs, also known as
fake blogs. The FakeBlogsWiki is described as, "a clearing house for
information about 'flogs', or fake weblogs created by corporate
marketing departments as lame marketing exercises." So far the website lists three flogs, the notorious lincoln fry blog from McDonald's (we blogged about this blog last week),
the ThatPepsiGirl blog
and the Associated Press's BadLanguage blog. Surely this number will climb as there are bound to more than three flogs out there.
Posted on February 14, 2005
Permalink | | | Comments (View)
| |
McDonald's Fake Blog
McDonald's developed a fake blog and flash website to go with its "french fry that looks like President Abraham Lincoln" advertising campaign. A commercial based on the fake french fry ran during the Super Bowl. This ad was pretty well received by TV viewers, however many bloggers are upset that McDonald's created a blog with fake people. ClickZ.com reported that, "Losers included McDonalds, which created a fake blog to go with its 'Lincoln Fry' effort that didn't play well with the online community." A "Lincoln Fry" prop used in the ad is now being auctioned at Yahoo for a bid price of $22,500, unless that is also a fake. Comments from other blogs: Buzz Marketing With Blogs, Blog Herald, E-Media Tidbits, Strategic Public Relations
Posted on February 8, 2005
Permalink | | | Comments (View)
| |
|
|
The Writers Write Lifestyle Network
|
|
