Wal-Mart 1, Boston Social Media Club 0

This is my second post about the Boston Social Media Club event in Newton on "Social Media Lessons for Big Businesses" at the Newton Marriott. The panel discussion was between Steve Restivo, Wal-Mart’s Director of Corporate affairs for the northeast, Dan Lyons, senior editor at Forbes, and Forrester’s Josh Bernoff.

Steve Restivo from Wal-Mart was a distinguished public relations professional in his 30's, who has only been working for Wal-Mart for one and half years, he described how most communications professionals would find Wal-Mart something of an anomaly in that the company did not have a corporate communications division for many years. The founders were focused on keeping their customers happy and did not see a need to keep the rest of the world happy. Because Wal-Mart was so successful the lack of a corporate communications department did not seem to be hurting the company. Corporate communications at Wal-Mart started 10 years ago, partly in response to the rise of a lot of bad press about the company.

Steve explained he was not around for the Working Families for Wal-Mart blog. During that scandal which happened during October of 2006 it was discovered two journalists were employed by Wal-Mart to blog about their experiences traveling across America and camping in Wal-Mart parking lots, however the journalists did not reveal they were being paid to write. In some ways it was a bigger scandal for Wal-Mart's public relations agency Edelman because the company has some very well know PR blogging experts employed there, Phil Gomes and Steve Rubel being probably the most famous. Phil Gomes is a colleague of mine as he is a Research Fellow in the society for new communications research.

Steve Restivo described how Wal-Mart had learned from these past mistakes, and now understood that transparency was paramount and how important it was for Wal-Mart to participant in social media communities. Steve also talked a little about the company's efforts with Facebook and applications, but did not give too many details.

Steve received a few questions from the audience but was not pressed very hard except by one audience member from the Digital Influence Group about Wal-Mart's current efforts in communicating with customers online. The chap from the digital influence group was a little muddled in his question delivery, more of a statement so I thought he lost his point by the time he pitched the question. The guy from the Digital Influence Group did not even address his question to Steve Restivo but seemed to want the other two panelists to berate Steve for Wal-Mart for not doing a good job with social media. Josh Bernoff stated that he thought Steve should speak for himself. Which he did and so Steve easily sidestepped it.

Something did not sit right with me about Steve and the way he talked about Wal-Mart and social media. Each of the panelists gave an initial 5-minute overview about social media and in Steve's talk he did a very good job of saying the right things. It sounded really good. But later when answering questions from the audience, I heard a few comments from Steve that on reflection causes me to think that Wal-Mart is not really embracing social media as a way to communicate and listen with customers but are engaging people through social media as a way to placate opposition, and still try to control Wal-Mart’s message. Steve described how he thought social media was a great way to inform people about what Wal-Mart is doing, and he went on in that vein. Which is okay, you might think, but I did not hear anything about Wal-Mart using social media to listen to their customers and change something about the company their customers wanted them to change. I came away from the presentation with the idea that Wal-Mart was not changing because of social media. Rather the company is using non-marketing approaches with its social media strategy a 1950's sales strategy if you will. Now that might not be the case with Wal-Mart overall and it might have just been Steve Restivo and the way he described how Wal-Mart is using social media. Again while his initial presentation was great, I thought he lost focus and revealed a few things when it came to question time that gave me the impression that Wal-Mart does not get social media.

Now that I think about this after writing most of this post, this is almost a textbook example of why social media is so effective; it is difficult to maintain a consistent message when you are talk like a human and not a communications professional. Within social media partly because of the volume of content and a human voice, facts, and issues arise that reveal whether the expectations a company wants to set, are in fact going to be met, you get a real sense for someone, and the language they use. Even though the Boston Social Media Club event was a public meeting Steve’s all to human voice gave me the opposite impression to what he probably wanted to achieve. I think that’s a lesson for all communications professionals whether in social media or when attending a presentation. But its also a lesson for companies; focus less on messages and more on reality, in that way companies don’t need messages, instead their people can just described what is happening.