When is a grass-roots blog not a grass-roots blog?

Seemingly, anytime it’s in support of Wal-Mart. Public relations shop Edelman admitted that its employees were the authors of a few pro-Wal-Mart blogs: Working Families for Wal-Mart, a sort of hub-blog from which sprang Exposing Wal-Mart’s Paid Critics and Wal-Marting Across America.

Edelman’s reaction to the exposure? Along with some “what’s the big deal” indignance from Wal-Marting Across America (the big deal is that you’re being paid to fake it, you PR hack you), the firm’s head honcho was appropriately contrite:

This week, Richard Edelman, president and CEO of the firm, apologized on his own blog: “I want to acknowledge our error in failing to be transparent about the identity of the two bloggers from the outset. This is 100% our responsibility and our error; not the client’s.”

It’s a hollow apology, considering Edelman’s previous blog trickery in service of Wal-Mart:

In its ongoing campaign to counter all the negative media it’s attracted over the years, Wal-Mart is playing the blog card by sparkling bloggers’ eyes with “exclusive” news releases that accentuate the company’s viewpoint.

Naturally, content-starved (and lazy) bloggers lap it up, to the point of cutting-and-pasting the copy they get from Wal-Mart’s PR firm, Edelman, directly into their posts. Which, when viewed through search-engine prisms, quickly lets the cat out of the corporately-manipulated bag.

So this subversive behavior shouldn’t be a surprise — Edelman’s a repeat offender. The firm is making a regular practice out of stealth marketing by use of the blog format. It’s a way to manufacture legitimacy — until it inevitably gets smoked out, at which point it backfires. In my mind, this puts a permanent black mark next to any organization that engages Edelman in its public-imaging efforts, because it should be clear by now how this firm has chosen to be intentionally dishonest with its campaigning.