wal-mart social media

Where is Wal-mart’s social media outreach?

This ongoing experience with “Thin Mint-y Gate” is raising a bunch of questions, for the audiences reading and commenting on blogs, for the Girl Scouts and their community, and for me as a blogger & management scholar. I hope I’ll get a chance to address some of these questions in future posts. Right now, let me focus on just one question.

My question is:

With all of the conversation about this story, about Wal-mart’s imputed motives and decision-making processes, and now about customers’ expressing how this competition with the Girl Scouts will affect their feelings about Wal-mart, where is Wal-mart’s social media outreach?

Wal-mart & Social Media

We read that Wal-mart is developing a sophisticated social media practice. We know that Wal-mart has a prominent program for enlisting the support of mom bloggers to burnish the organization’s reputation and attract current and future customers: the “Wal-mart 11″.

Why hasn’t somebody from Wal-mart’s social media group reached out to bloggers, either to me or to others who’ve picked up and run with this story?

You recall that late Monday night I posted a story about having sampled Wal-mart’s two new “value brand” cookie varieties, which I noted were not only quite tasty but also remarkably similar to two celebrity Girl Scout cookies, the Thin Mint and the Tag-A-Long.

In this post I raised the question of whether Wal-mart, an organization claiming to be concerned about its reputation as a good corporate citizen, should consciously or unconsciously be choosing to compete against the Girl Scouts by (1) “knocking off” two of the most iconic Girl Scout cookie styles, (2) selling them year-round and (3) at a lower price. I argued that these three decisions by Wal-mart were likely to take cookie market share from the Girl Scouts, and that doing this might not earn for Wal-mart the “good citizenship” merit badge.

The Viral Spiral of the Cookie Monster

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