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MarketingVOX: PR firm Edelman, which after a fake-blog scandal last week promised to be more open in its dealings, on Thursday admitted it is behind two other fake blogs created for client Wal-Mart.
One blog appears is on the site of Working Families for Wal-Mart, the "astroturf" advocacy group formed by Edelman last December, writes MediaPost. More intriguingly, however, the second fake blog is on WFWM subsidiary site Paid Critics - which is devoted to "exposing" links between unions and other vested interests that are supposedly "smearing Wal-Mart."
Last week, the Wal-Marting Across America blog was shut down after it was revealed to have been written by two writers paid by WFWM. Now the three contributors to the two other Edelman-created blogs are identified on them as Edelman employees whose clients include Working Families for Wal-Mart.
"Doesn't anybody at Edelman see the irony [ed.: perhaps more apt would be "hypocrisy"] behind having their own paid critics writing Wal-Mart's Paid Critics blog?" Sean Carton, chief strategy officer for Baltimore interactive consultancy idfive, is quoted as asking. "It was old media thinking in the new media world, and you can't get away with that [stuff] anymore."
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