Monday, March 06, 2006

Wal-Mart Enlists Bloggers in Its PR. Campaign


Image source: graphics.stanford.edu


Michael Barbaro writes in The New York Times:

Brian Pickrell, a blogger, recently posted a note on his Web site attacking state legislation that would force Wal-Mart Stores to spend more on employee health insurance. "All across the country, newspaper editorial boards — no great friends of business — are ripping the bills," he wrote.

It was the kind of pro-Wal-Mart comment the giant retailer might write itself. And, in fact, it did.

Several sentences in Mr. Pickrell's Jan. 20 posting — and others from different days — are identical to those written by an employee at one of Wal-Mart's public relations firms and distributed by e-mail to bloggers.

Under assault as never before, Wal-Mart is increasingly looking beyond the mainstream media and working directly with bloggers, feeding them exclusive nuggets of news, suggesting topics for postings and even inviting them to visit its corporate headquarters.

More here.

1 Comments:

At Tue Mar 07, 12:30:00 AM PST, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Brian appears to be a political neanderthal, and not very bright to boot (if my "neanderthal" comment was not enough hint).

He actually deleted the content that NTY was quoting from his blog, and then when I asked him who was lying about the content, him or NYT (since he apparently blocks Wayback Machine archives), the content magically reappeared. I pretended to be confused about how to find the text in question (as if I didn't know how to press Ctrl-F in Firefox), and he took the bait. What a bozo.

It's too bad he hasn't been offered a job by the current administration - he'd fit right in (lie, lie, lie, obfuscate, lie, leak, lie, publish press release as objective journalism, lie lie lie...)

http://www.iowavoice.com/comment.php?serendipity[entry_id]=1646&serendipity[type]=comments&serendipity[entry_id]=1646

might show my comments to him; if not my apologies (sorry for my simpering tone - I want him to take the bait in the future if he acts like such a jackass again).

Cheers,
-Jon

 

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