Monday I attended Social Media Club’s Social Media to Corporate Media conference, held at SAP’s campus in Palo Alto. It was a great gathering of about 45 (my broad brush estimate, not an official figure) communicators representing Silicon Valley tech firms, PR agencies, consultants and social media gurus.

The conference featured interesting talks by Robert Scoble (ex of Microsoft and now at PodTech) and Lisa Stone, co-founder of BlogHer.org, with some interactive group discussion in-between, and finished up with Giovanni Rodriguez’s conversation with Geoff Kerr, who leads global comms for SAP labs.

Robert talked about his experience at Microsoft and the way social media has changed the distribution channels for corporate communications. He related his own experience of letting people know in a conference on a Saturday that he was going to leave Microsoft and how by Monday, the news had appeared in dozens of first-tier online and print publications and had generated 50 million media impressions.

He also advocated “conversational” reporting, and used as an example a 35-minute reality-TV style video he took of a press conference/demo for Cisco’s new TelePresence high-end ($500K to $1M) teleconferencing technology. Many at the conference, myself included, felt that few people would sit through 35 minutes of anything, but Scoble feels the unedited video is more authentic than a “produced” corporate video.

Lisa Stone devoted her presentation to a deconstruction of the Walmarting Across America “flogging” debacle, whether it was no big deal or a serious violation of trust, and how it affected consumer perceptions of Wal-Mart, arguably a company with an already-less-than-stellar reputation with consumers. Lisa is really smart, and I was intrigued by her conversation on BlogHer with Morra Aarons, formerly of Edelman, and one of the people at the agency responsible for the Wal-Mart account.

Aarons defended the Wal-Mart flog’s Edelman roots by saying “call any 1-800 coalition number for many non-profits and companies and you’ll get a PR firm.” She goes on to ask, in relation to the Wal-Mart case “why is a blog so different? Because it’s more visible to those beyond the target audience?”

Lisa disputes this analogy, and believes bloggers owe their readers the answers to four questions:

1. Who are the bloggers?
2. What are the bloggers doing?
3. Why are the bloggers doing this?
4. Why do I — the reader — care?

The WalMart blog flunks every question

(Lisa details in her post how she thinks Wal-Mart fails to correctly answer these questions)

The pivotal issue with the Wal-Mart case is that it is a violation of trust, that the bloggers were not exactly who they said they were and did not represent who they said they represented.

What’s interesting is, while Edelman has accepted some responsibility and apologized for the whole affair, much of the blame is being put on Wal-Mart. Many of the discussions I’ve read assume that Wal-Mart’s management wanted to do the Walmarting Across America blog over the objections of Edelman, and I believe (I use the word believe here, total conjecture on my part) it is quite possibly the opposite situation. I cannot imagine anyone inside of Wal-Mart conjuring up a scheme involving a couple of hayseeds roaming Wal-Marts around the country in an RV and serving up aw shucks homespun anecdotes about the joys of being a Wal-Mart employee. Wal-Mart is based in Bentonville, Arkansas, home also to thousands of aw shucks RV owners. These people don’t think they’re cute or down-home. There’s nothing novel about this to them, and I don’t believe any Wal-Mart exec would have come up with this idea. I think Edelman pitched the idea to Wal-Mart.

Regardless of whether Edelman or Wal-Mart came up with the concept, there are two violations of trust here, then. The first is consumer trust which has been violated by Wal-Mart. The second is the trust Wal-Mart, as a client, placed in Edelman. How could someone as social media savvy as Edelman have allowed (advised?) its client to embark on such an obviously flawed venture? This case will undoubtedly find its way into the Social Media J-school textbooks of the future.

The conference wound up with Giovanni Rodriquez’s interview with Geoff Kerr, who leads comms for SAP labs. Geoff has extensive corporate communications, and analyst and investor relations experience, and he has used them well to move SAP’s senior executive management to “let go” of the SAP brand and the conversation around it. SAP is not known for its cutting edge marketing or innovative use of communications, so this accomplishment, for which Kerr gives Giovanni some credit, is all the more impressive.

Finally, much credit to Chris Heuer of the nascent Social Media Club (aka SM2CM) for an excellent agenda and to Kristie Wells, Social Media Club’s “Diva of Details,” for a super event. Chris tells me Social Media Club is going to announce some kind of transparency service that will enable readers and bloggers to easily understand who bloggers are being paid by and what, if anything, their agenda is, to help bolster credibility in the blogsphere and avoid the threat of broader Wal-Martization of social media.

And I’ll close with few interesting comments made in the room Monday:

“You don’t have to talk to Walt Mossberg anymore.”
“People are sick of committee-based marketing.”
“‘I’ is not a bad word.”
Robert Scoble

“Maybe we should make social media a verb and say it’s socializing media.”
Giovanni Rodriguez

“Set up your blogs and your corporate blogging strategy before the crisis happens.”
Chris Heuer

“Jonathan Schwartz isn’t a CEO blogger. He’s a blogger who became CEO.”
Joel Postman