u235

Well it is a free country isn't it? So what rule is there to stop Walmart from planting pro-Walmart bloggers on the net? None of course, that's the joy of the net, the joie de vivre, the raison d'etre, the last truly wild west, anarchistic frontier.

So what exactly are they doing and how are they doing it?

Apparently Walmart maintains a list of pro-Walmarters (call 'em ProWals for short) to whom they release news and development tidbits before they hit the main stream media. They suggest topics and issues for the less-creative to fill in, kind of like your first grade teacher with a writing assignments (old-magazine cutouts not included). Of course the inevitable happened... one might even say that the type of ProWal blogger that would sell their soul to promote a Megalocorp like Walmart could not be the cream of the e-crop... and bloggers just cut, pasted and posted directly from the Walmart propaganda. Suddenly the same phraseology started popping up on various sites making it pretty clear that the material was more or less planted. It didn't take long for a news service (again props to the Times) to notice. Nor did it take much sniffing out apparently - because before long the times had copies in hand of emails being sent to ProWals.

Some of the ProWals are pissed at being found out - tho there's not much they can do about it. (Again, I'm missing the 'pride' aspect at being an fanboy for a company that's known for hiring and abusing illegal aliens, or doing everything they can not to pay health care for their employees, etc..) They're upset because they're now clearly identified for filching material someone else wrote - which - in blogger terms is a no, no unless you give credit to the original source. In essence, if you're getting hits for re-printing someone elses email, what value is your blog?

So why sell out? Are they being paid? No, it doesn't appear so. Which again raises the question that if they're not all Walmart employees then why the hell would they provide PR free of charge (other than again, maybe they're just all retarded). Is it the lure of getting numbers and figures before they're published in formal press releases? I can't say - I mean just how interesting IS the fact that some Walmart in Bumfuck NM received 500 applications for it's new store? Maybe it's a "oooo I'm a member of a super-secret club with a decoder ring and 3d vision glasses and you're not!" mentality. Hard to say, since I don't cut and paste from pre-digested material myself without proper credit (usually distinguished by quote boxes or italics).

Regardless of why ProWals are doing it, it clearly is a success for Walmarts propaganda engine. They've taken some of the more annoying aspects of the last election and turned it into a technique that Goebbels would have appreciated. In the end I don't know just how effective it could really be - since the type of person who would just instantly believe what they read is not your typical blog-reader. Net-dwellers are a far, far more paranoid and suspicious lot and while it may sound like a relatively cheap form of advertising to some executive, it probably won't have much, if any impact on the more savvy types who read and post their own blogs.

Q.E.D.