For Edelman, it makes perfect sense to establish and communicate the limits of your dealings with the blogosphere - especially if the stumbles of your high profile client programs are forever being highlighted online.

Richard Edelman has posted the general guidelines Edelman employees will follow when a conversation about their practice and their client develops online. They make perfect sense and show a balanced approach to managing an emerging business practice. But this paragraph struck me as unusual:

If there are questions posed about a given program, particularly about our approach, we will do our best to ensure that those most closely involved with the effort are commenting. It is a far better option to have those truly informed about our work join the conversation as and when appropriate. This is what happened on Microsoft with both Rick Murray, head of Me2Revolution, and Pete Pedersen, our relationship manager on the client, commenting in PRWeek.

[Cartoon-like headshake] Whaa? Wait. The head of your online practice thought the best place to respond to criticism about a blogger outreach program was … IN PRINT? IN A TRADE MAGAZINE? Not all the critics of the VISTA program are public relations pros - and not all PRs subscribe to PRWeek.

Which you have to be to read Murray’s comments - because the PRWeek piece is behind a subscriber firewall. (Unless you know to read Keith’s blog. Then there is a free link)

As for you bloggers who didn’t get a free laptop preloaded with Vista, here’s Rick’s POV:

“…Murray said, in part, the furor could have something to do with the limited scope of the campaign.

He added, “I think the reality is, when you handpick a small group of people out of 55 million bloggers, [many will] be less than happy with the solution.”

Yeah. Shut up you whiners.

[tags] Vista, Edelman, blogger relations [/tags]