Wal-Marting Across America

» see walmartingacrossamerica.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The blog launched on 27 September 2006 and was over by 12 October. In between, two people called Jim and Laura drove a recreational vehicle from Las Vegas toward Georgia, parked overnight in Walmart lots because Walmart lets you do that for free, and wrote up the employees and customers they met. The posts were warm, unhurried and entirely about strangers being nice to them.

Jim was Jim Thresher, a staff photographer at The Washington Post. Laura was Laura St. Claire, a freelance writer who also worked at the US Treasury. Neither was a plant in the sense of being fictional; they existed, the trip happened, the people in it were real. What was missing from the blog was that Walmart's public relations agency, Edelman, had rented the vehicle, covered the fuel and paid Laura a fee for every entry, and that the whole thing was published under the banner of Working Families for Wal-Mart, an advocacy group Edelman had itself set up.

BusinessWeek published Wal-Mart's Jim and Laura: The Real Story on 9 October 2006. The disclosure problem was not subtle and the response was immediate, because 2006 was the year the business press had decided blogs were a credibility machine and here was the largest retailer in the world caught renting one. Richard Edelman apologized publicly within the week, acknowledging that his firm had failed to be transparent about who the bloggers were from the start.

~ the chronicle ~

~ fifteen days ~

The route was Las Vegas to Georgia, finishing at the Georgia National Fair, and the last ordinary post went up on 10 October at 5:19 in the morning under the title Thanks for Stopping, Bye. By then the expose was a day old and the blog was being read by an audience it had never been written for. Of its fifteen days of life, the first twelve were obscure and the last three were a news story.

The detail that gets left out of most retellings is how the thing started, because Laura explained it herself afterward. She and Jim had hiked in Arizona that April, got up at five in the morning in a town where nothing was open except the Walmart, and the idea arrived from there. She wanted to write an RV travel piece and thought it wise to get permission before using the parking lots. So she called her brother, who worked at Edelman. In her own account the agency did not just grant permission, it offered to sponsor the trip.

~ the final word ~

The blog did not go dark quietly. On 12 October 2006 at 7:52 in the morning Laura posted a piece titled The Final Word and that is the last thing published on the site. It opens by saying the blog was about the people they met and the stories they told, then tells the Arizona story and the phone call to the brother, then turns.

She writes that a blogger had asked while they were on the road whether they were real people. They were. "We're real people, and we took a real RV on a real trip." Then: the whole world now knows who they are, where they live and where they work, thanks to an organized Walmart opposition group. Then: "So now we're being attacked. Why? Because we dared to write positive things about Wal-Mart." It ends with her saying she had a great time and would do it again. For a document written on the worst day of a small public scandal, it is not a bad piece of writing, and it never concedes the one point everybody was actually making, which was about disclosure rather than sincerity.

~ the next chapter ~

What outlived the blog was a word. People reaching for a name for a corporate-funded blog that pretends not to be one settled on flog, and the usage traces straight back to this fortnight. The industry response followed: the Word of Mouth Marketing Association's disclosure rules and the FTC's 2009 guidance on endorsements both grew out of a run of cases that this one headlines.

I read about it years late and from the outside, as a case study rather than as news, in the way everybody outside the American PR trade did. The practice itself needed no translation. Any market with an advertising industry has a version of this, and most of them never got a BusinessWeek piece written about them.

~ the funny part ~

The Internet Archive never captured the live flog. Its first record of walmartingacrossamerica.com is 11 November 2006, a month after the end, and what sits there is The Final Word. The most notorious fake blog in the history of public relations survives in the archive only as its own rebuttal, with the twelve days of innocent road-trip posts that caused the problem gone from the crawl entirely.

What the crawler did keep is the production value, which nobody mentions and which was considerable. The blog shipped with three period skins you could switch between, labeled 1925, 1935 and 1955, each with its own full-width illustrated header: an Art Deco ocean liner bow for the twenties, a biplane over an airmail map for the thirties. Somebody commissioned original artwork in three historical styles for a blog that was supposed to read as two amateurs with a laptop.

It also was not taken down. The blog sat at that exact final state, 3,883 bytes, for another ten months, served off an Apache 1.3.33 running on Darwin with PHP 4.4.2, which is somebody's Mac in a cupboard. On 23 August 2007 the address finally started redirecting away. By 2011 it was parked, and today walmartingacrossamerica.com is a Thai slot machine site.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »