Now Edelman has admitted that it’s been operating two other fake blogs (or “flogs” – I love it!) on behalf of Wal-Mart. The incident has become a huge embarrassment for a PR firm that has tried to position itself as being on the leading edge of Web 2.0 marketing. You can read the details here.

There’s no question these bogus blogs were a dumb idea, particularly for a firm as progressive as Edelman. There is a silver lining to this whole affair, though: the incident has exposed how seriously bloggers take the transparency issue. Consider that it was only about a year ago that Forbes published Attack of the Blogs, a vicious account of the blogosphere that started “Web logs are the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective.” That was a popular view of bloggers a year ago, so think of how far the medium has come when a deception like Edelman’s draws this much condemnation from that very same “lynch mob.”

In researching the culture of social media this year, I’ve been struck again and again with how effectively bloggers are organizing themselves around a set of very admirable principles. The premium is on fairness, honesty and openness and the blogosphere is rapidly developing a system of governance that insures that these values are upheld. The speed at which the community has responded to the Edelman gaffe is a tribute to bloggers’ commitment to transparency. This whole thing will blow over quickly and I expect we’ll all be better off for having had a chance to test the blogosphere’s ability to police itself.

BoingBoing.net compliments and links to a 60 Minutes report, “Unlikely Terrorists On No Fly List,” which paints a devastating picture of incompetence and arrogance at the FBI and the Transportation Safety Agency. 60 Minutes got hold of the secret “No Fly” list and found 44,000 names on it, including numerous dead people, heads of state and people locked up in prison. The names of 11 of the 15 9/11 hijackers were on the list, despite the fact that they’ve been dead for five years.

The most amazing part of the story, I thought, was that common names are included in the list without any additional identifying information. This creates enormous disruption for innocent people whose only crime is having the same name as somebody else. And it’s not like these are distinctive names. One of them is Robert Johnson. CBS actually gathered together a group of people named Robert Johnson at random and asked them about their experiences. All of them have experienced significant delay and disruption when going through airports. Many said they are routinely questioned for hours before they’re allowed to board a plane. Do you think the FBI could provide screeners with a little more information than just a name? Of course not. The agency is shielded by a shroud of government secrecy, which covers up its ineptitude.

I’ve been on a rant about airport security since these ridiculous new rules were passed limiting travelers to carrying on no more than three ounces of liquids and gels in a one-quart plastic bag that must be available for inspection. Where on earth do they come up with these rules? What’s magic about three ounces? Why does it have to be a one-quart plastic bag? We don’t know, because the TSA doesn’t have to explain anything. The fact that it would be almost impossible to blow up a plane using chemicals doesn’t matter.

Meanwhile, we now arrive two hours before a flight leaves, endure half-hour waits in security lines and wait 30-45 minutes in baggage claim at our destination because we had to check our luggage in order to bring a can of deodorant on the trip. And the real likely targets of the next terrorist attack – subways, concert halls and sports stadiums – remain wide open.

Compliments to 60 Minutes for exposing this stupidity.

For a company that’s so well tuned-in to the psychology of its customers, Wal-Mart is a flop so far in social media. The company just shut down Wal-Marting across America, a blog written by Jim and Laura, who are ostensibly two ordinary folks chronicling their experiences camping across America in Wal-Mart parking lots. The trouble is that the blog was really a promotional effort underwritten by Working Families for Wal-Mart, an organization created by Wal-Mart’s public relations firm, Edelman.

Wal-Mart has come in for a lot of criticism over the blog since BusinessWeek exposed Wal-Mart’s indirect sponsorship in an article this week. Today’s final post by Laura expresses the couple’s frustration at being swarmed by Wal-Mart’s critics. “So now we’re being attacked. Why? Because we dared to write positive things about Wal-Mart,” she writes. “The people who hate Wal-Mart couldn’t argue with anything we said — we were writing about real people and telling true stories.”

Well, yes. But those true stories were apparently all positive (it’s hard to tell; the archive has disappeared). Wal-Marting Across America was an interesting experiment by Edelman that pushed the limits of what the blogosphere would tolerate. But Edelman went overboard. In setting such a sunny tone, the agency raised suspicions about the blog’s real purpose and breached the conventions of transparency and honesty preached by its own name bloggers like Steve Rubel. This was a bad idea that got a richly deserved upbraiding in the press. Interestingly, Rubel hasn’t yet blogged about the affair. I’ll look forward to reading his thoughts.

The Wal-Marting Across America affair comes shortly after Wal-Mart shut down The Hub, a social networking site for teens. Critics had roasted the site from day one for being too promotional and too restrictive on what members could say. Wal-Mart continues to thrash about in social media. That’s surprising, considering it’s advised by Edelman, one of the most innovative agencies in this area. Let’s hope the company’s next venture is a little more in-tune with its audience.

When the head of the world’s largest consumer products company tells marketers to “let go” of their brands and give in to consumer “pull” over marketing “push,” people should sit up and take notice. That’s exactly what Procter & Gamble CEO A.G. Lafley told the Association of National Advertisers conference. Read about it at AdAge.com. Lafley cited consumer-generated media as a major factor in market changes that are putting consumers back in control. The time has arrived to play by their rules. There is an opportunity, if marketers can stop talking and start listening, to become the principal channel by which their companies learn what consumers want.

Every marketer – and I mean every single one – should read this iMedia Connection interview with integrated marketing expert Don Schultz. It has so much insight into the role of marketing in conversation-based markets.

High points:

• Marketers are trained to talk, not to listen. Talking doesn’t work any more.
• Consumers don’t have to listen to marketing messages any more. They are going around marketing departments.
• Many marketers interpreted the dot-com implosion as a sign that nothing had really changed and went back to doing things the way they had always done them. They missed the underlying shift that now threatens to capsize them.
• Customer focus and customer-centricity are two different things. Customer focus is trying to sell more things to the same customers and it doesn’t work. You have to put the customer at the center.
• Businesses have done a lousy job of integrating their online and conventional media marketing. Most of them need to blow it up and start over.
• Marketers’ new job is to create “placeholders,” or brands that stick in the customer’s mind as being associated with a certain want or need. Think iPod.
• Mainstream media is becoming less and less effective, yet marketers are pouring more and more dollars into it. This is crazy.

I’m paraphrasing and perhaps oversimplifying, but those are some of the main points. It’s a long interview but worth every minute of your time.

I’m thrilled to be asked to keynote The Society for New Communications Research‘s inaugural Research Symposium & Awards Gala on November 1 – 2, 2006 in Boston. This is a great group started by Jen McClure, a successful public relations professional who started SNCR to research and promote new social media channels. I highly recommend her New Communications Review

The Research Symposium has a great lineup of sessions, including advice on corporate blogging, storytelling and the legal issues of podcasting. At $325, it’s a bargain, and your money is going to support a very worthwhile nonprofit effort. Plus you get a nice dinner gala thrown in :-).

Pressure to blog. Traffic to the Chicago Sun-Times website is off 25% since Roger Ebert took a medical leave for surgery. Michelle Malkin’s traffic dropped by 80,000 (I assume that’s daily) when she took a vacation. You stop blogging for a few weeks and people desert in droves. Are we headed for an epidemic of blogger burnout?

Will newspapers even be around in 10 years? I expect so, but the number of people reading them will get smaller and smaller. The average viewer of network evening news is 60. Yikes. Bad news for newspapers is bad news for us all.

HeyLetsGo.com is an interesting evolution of social networks. It’s kind of a regionalized MySpace.com, with an excellent collection of local happenings and tools to find friends in the area. This is where social networks will go, I believe. There’ll be a few massive international sites and then a lot of local and special-interest variations.

Forrester’s Charlene Li is trying to create a model to measure the ROI of blogging. She’s got an extensive list of possible metrics in this blog post. The ROI question is a big deal for corporations, despite the relatively low cost of blogging services. Charlene raises a good point about risk: how do you calculate the potential damage to the corporation of a damaging blog entry, like one that contains proprietary financial data? She proposes a way to model that.

Charlene is seeking input on the ROI project via her blog.

InformationWeek picked up on an interesting trend: the number of IT managers is growing. The newsweekly cites Bureau of Labor Statistics figures documenting a 44% increase in IT management titles since 2001, while programming and support jobs are down 19%. The publication cites several reasons for this shift, principally outsourcing and the trend toward aligning IT people with the business, which means more project management and less coding.

This is a welcome trend. Outsourcing has finally reached a level of legitimacy within most businesses that executives are rethinking the wisdom of having a captive workforce of people who don’t add value to the business but mainly tend the machines. This is actually good news for technical IT people, too. A glass ceiling has existed in corporations for a long time when it comes to IT. Technical people could only go so far in the organization before their lack of business skills held them back.

The figures indicate that a two-track model is developing. Technical people can go to work for organizations that specialize in providing IT infrastructure and development on an outsourced basis. They have a good career path there. IT people with business skills can go the management route within businesses, who are increasingly outsourcing non-strategic functions. They’ll have more opportunity than they would have had in the past, too.

Kudos to IWeek for spotting this shift.