• by Tom Siebert , November 28, 2006

The final verdict from the Word of Mouth Marketing Association regarding public relations firm Edelman and its status in the organization is unlikely to affect its relationship with any current or potential clients, assert several marketing experts.

Edelman's membership in WOMMA is currently under 90-day review because of the PR agency's creation of three flogs, or fake blogs, for the big box retailer. The agency has killed one site, the RV travel site Wal-Marting Across America, and altered two others (a blog on Working Families for Wal-mart; and Paid Critics, a site that pays Edelman employees to expose Wal-Mart's critics) by crediting previously anonymous postings, which link to brief biographies that define the posters as employees of Edelman who work on the Wal-Mart account, although there is no description of Edelman as a PR firm.

Because of this, and the fact that there is no opportunity to respond to either blogs' posting, as well as that Working Families for Wal-Mart is an Edelman creation at its core, numerous observers say that the revisions still do not adhere to WOMMA's recently created ethical guidelines regarding transparency and other matters of honest conversation with consumers.

But even if WOMMA takes the harshest view and tosses Edelman from its ranks, the end result is unlikely to impact Edelman's bottom line.

In fact, theorizes Dave Taylor--founder of Intuitive Systems consultancy, who operates three blogs--Edelman could ultimately benefit from the entire affair.

"I find it very likely that a lot of clients might be saying 'tsk-tsk' in public, but once they get alone they pat Edelman on the back and say 'good job,'" Taylor says. "In the long run, does any client really care if its agency is a member of WOMMA? Of course not. Some people will see this as [Edelman] taking the arrows for its client."

A former WOMMA board member says Wal-Mart has far bigger concerns.

"Of all their ethical transgressions, this is nothing to Wal-Mart," says Zane Safrit of Conference Calls Unlimited in Iowa, who was named a WOMMA board member in September but resigned less than a month later--about the same time the Edelman/Wal-Mart flog revelations were breaking in the press. "The bigger issue here is whether PR agencies can even do Word of Mouth marketing. I don't think they get it."

Another current WOMMA board member says the marketing realm and the organization are both young, and everyone involved deserves to be cut some slack.

"I think people are taking a step back on this is because no one is sure what might be found going on in their own organization," says Pete Blackshaw, of Nielsen BuzzMetrics. "One of the big issues to prove here relates to whether organizations know what the left hand is doing? People may be slower to pass judgment because they are concerned that there could be something in their backyard that they don't even know about."

A week after Edelman was put under review, WOMMA CEO Andy Sernovitz said he had not looked at the PR firm's revised blogs. Monday, he refused to comment on whether he had yet looked at the sites.

Richard Edelman did not return calls for comment.