I fully expected a big-time PR agency like Edelman to bank hard into the turn and speed up when they got bumped with this entire Walmart fiasco.
To me, this wasn’t something you tried to let fade away as a tactic. But then again, what do I know? I’ve never run a madison avenue type PR firm. However, I know bloggers, and blogs, and I know how they think/work, and this was a blogging issue. So perhaps maybe I’m even more qualified than they are?
I contacted Richard Edelman shortly after the story broke to present an idea to him, which he replied and said he thought it was good and he forwarded it to Steve Rubel for consideration, but I never heard back about.
At the time I had just released my BlogKits Blog Honor Badges, built to help raise awareness for bloggers who want to be able to make money, but who won’t try to fool their readers in the process.
My idea: Let’s work on an official set of badges for PR firms, independent of the WOMMA, who by the way is now considering kicking Edelman out of.
If done right, this would have been, could have been, a classic lemons to lemonade story. Instead of hiding from the story, why not embrace it, take your lumps and do something to proactively make a change for the better? Something that proves you are repentent.
There’s always a way to make things better if you can think creatively. Would this have worked? Not sure, but done right it would have won back the bloggers. But maybe they simply don’t care about them?
