Social Media
Edelman was one of the first PR practitioners to realise the importance of social media and create a specialist practice. He has written a blog since 2004, being one of the first CEOs to do so. He picks the topics of posts himself, not always sticking to "safe" topics and replies to comments himself. In 2007 PR Week described him as being "probably the best-known PR blogger" pointing out that this was partly due to the status being achieved partly by accident through creating controversy, such as when he criticised the Bush administration for paying for positive news stories about the Iraq war.
Edelman coined the phrase circle of cross influence to describe how people are increasingly influenced by other people, the internet, new media and cable TV, rather than mainstream media. As he puts it "The keys to the car have been taken away from government."
In March 2006, Edelman appeared on CNN's Reliable Sources with Howard Kurtz after a New York Times article reported that Edelman was supplying information to "friendly bloggers" about his client Walmart, who did not disclose where they got their information from. In October 2006, he was forced to apologize after it was revealed that a blog commissioned by Working Families for Walmart was actually written by "fake people" or rather writers paid by Edelman's company. He acknowledged that it was his company's mistake, which WebProNews reported would have taken "guts to admit ... and even more to apologize".
He has advised the Canadian tar sands industry how to counter negative PR from NGOs using social media.
Read more about this topic: Richard Edelman
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