Blog P.I.

Because I’m a sucker for nametags and PowerPoint presentations, during lunchtime hours on Wednesday I attended a panel discussion co-sponsored by GWU’s Institute for Politics Democracy & the Internet (yes, “Politics Democracy”; no, I’m not sure which word is supposed to modify the other) and PR agency Edelman*. But there was another reason to attend, and Edelman was it — the advertised presence of CEO Richard Edelman, that is.

If you don’t follow business or PR blogs, then you may not be aware of the ethical scrape Edelman recently got its blue chip client, Wal-Mart, into. The friction involved revelations that a few presumably grassroots pro-Wal-Mart blogs were in fact astroturf blogs — one might call them “astroblogs,” if the term “flog” wasn’t already gaining popularity.

To recap, as briefly as possible: In early October, BusinessWeek revealed that a blog called Wal-Marting Across America — featuring a couple driving their RV cross-country, using Wal-Mart parking lots as rest stops — was conceived and launched by Edelman on behalf of Working Families for Wal-Mart. The problem is, none of the parties involved disclosed the arrangement. Once outed, the blog was quickly shuttered.

In short order, B.L. Ochman called on WOMMA to throw Edelman out for having violated a code of ethics Edelman had helped develop, Richard Edelman started doing damage control on the company’s own website, his firm fessed up to two more flogs, and Edelman-employed blogger Steve Rubel drew flak for saying as little as possible about the incident (though he did not work on these Wal-Mart projects). It was quite the swarm.

In the end, WOMMA put Edelman on probation and the company started posting disclosures to their still-extant Wal-Mart blogs. So naturally, if Richard Edelman was going to be taking questions from the audience at a blogger conference, I would have to be there.

However — guess who didn’t show? Richard Edelman. And guess who did show? Activists from Wal-Mart Watch. They stood outside the lobby of the conference room at George Washington University handing out flyers titled “THE WAL-MART BFLOG.”

Nevertheless, there was still a panel discussion to be attended. Because the conversation ranged across many topics, allow me to fall back on the ol’ faithful of transition-averse writers — the bullet-point:

• Perhaps the main reason for convening the panel was a new survey by Edelman’s research arm, StrategyOne, titled “Blog Readership in the USA.” Danny Glover has already recapped most of the findings at Technology Daily, so I won’t go into them here. I will point out that whereas the Edelman study focused on all blogs, the panel discussion was titled “Trends in Political Blogging” — which gave the discussion a mild case of multiple-personality disorder during the Q&A period.

• For example, StrategyOne found that half of all blog readers are in the 18-24 age range, whereas BlogAds and ComScore surveys have shown that readers of political blogs tend to be middle-aged. Panelist Jacki Schechner of CNN offered that at CNN’s recent election night party, their invited bloggers were mostly aged 35-50, and almost none of them were below 30. Because political blogs were what post attendees were interested in, IPDI (note: pronounced “ipdee,” not “I-P-D-I”) director Carol Darr called on BlogAds founder Henry Copeland to generalize about numbers related to the political blogosphere. His estimates: About 100,000 people are blogging daily with an audience of “more than just their friends.” Some 10,000 of them have what could be considered a “commercial audience” — at least 1,000 daily readers (and keep in mind there are only 50,000 brick and mortar journalists in the U.S.). And how many readers of political blogs? Copeland thinks it’s somewhere between 2 and 5 million.

• RNC eCampaign director Patrick Ruffini, another panelist, praised the netroots’ Use It Or Lose It pre-election campaign, in which liberal bloggers called on safe incumbents with big warchests to donate more to fellow Dems in tight races — or else. Ruffini figures they probably raised as much money then as by collecting the small donations bloggers are best known for. Another good point from Ruffini: When candidates’ positions are fairly similar, such as in a primary campaign, blogs become all the more influential.

• Edelman Paris representative Guillaume Du Gardier made a great point about podcasting (or netcasting) and video-casting (no one likes “vlogging”) — while often mentioned in the same breath as blogging, they are more top-down, like traditional media. Blogs are a conversation, but podcasts tend to be one-way communications. I would add, this is one reason why YouTube has been so successful — it makes video-blogging almost as interactive as a regular text-based weblog.

• Schechner said doesn’t consider journalists who blog to be “bloggers” — if your voice is already represented in the media, then you can’t properly be one. I follow that, but it seems incomplete. Not a few bloggers hate the term “blog” and by logical extension, the term “blogger,” too. And it is certainly used as a term of derision, mostly in meatspace rather than cyberspace. Maybe it would be nice to do away with the term, but it’s just not going to happen. Perhaps it would be better to redefine it: Jeff Jarvis likes to say journalism is an act, not a profession — but surely the same must be true of blogging. But if you’re a call center manager whose blog is mentioned in the New York Times, they’re still going to call you a “blogger” on first reference.

• Responding to Schechner’s actual point, I would say that a blogging journalist who often links to “true” bloggers should be considered part of the blogosphere. Will Bunch of the Philly Daily News-hosted Attytood is one who does. Chris Cillizza, who writes The Fix for the Washington Post, does not. So you don’t have to be a blogger first to be a part of the blogosphere, while having a blog does not necessarily make you a blogger. This ticket has not been resolved.

• Bias and balance are an eternal theme of political bloggers right and left, as both believe the mainstream media favors the other side. But this also extends to non-partisan panel discussions, evidenced by a representative from NewAssignment.Net asking if any effort was made to court Democratic representation. (In addition to Ruffini, StrategyOne research director Robert Moran mentioned he had previously worked in GOP politics.) You could tell that Darr didn’t want to say “No.” She said they had sought a range of views, hinted that panelist Bill Allison’s Sunlight Foundation wasn’t exactly a member of the VRWC, and added that Schechner represented “the media.” Pressed about whether IPDI had specifically sought a Democrat for the panel, she conceded the answer was: “No.”

• The consensus seemed to be that if the Internet had existed in 1976, Ronald Reagan would have defeated Gerald Ford for the Republican presidential nomination. I tend not to ponder such impossible “what ifs,” but that one is interesting to think about.

• Predictions for 2008? Schechner believes candidates will be better schooled in the ways of the blog. Ruffini wants to see better wireless capability for field organizing — SMS isn’t sophisticated enough. Moran predicted the “ad guys in Old Town” will start getting “jealous” (call me a pedant if you must, but the proper word is “envious”), because blog advisers will start getting the good salaries. Personally, that’s the one I’m counting on.

• And nobody said a word about the Edelman/Wal-Mart controversy.

*Full disclosure: Edelman is a competitor of my employer. At my last job, I spoke at an event co-sponsored by Edelman. I also know a handful of current and former Edelman employees, whom I count as friends or friendly acquaintances.