Marketing Profs reports on Edelman’s latest “scandal”. Apparently, they were involved in a Microsoft PR campaign where a number of high-profile bloggers received rather expensive laptops with the new Vista operating system installed. To review and write about.

While you may have some objections to giving away such expensive gear to journalists - why not just let them use if for a little while and then return it, which would be less complicated - there was full disclosure on many blogs. They told their readers from where they got the laptops, and that’s fine.

Let’s say Edelman and Microsoft even explicitly told bloggers to be open about where they got the laptops from. It would have been the right thing to do, and I believe both companies are smart enough to know and do that.

Even then, they would still have committed a big mistake. If you have the current history of online scandals, like Edelman do, and the reputation of Microsoft, you shouldn’t be doing things that are even remotely near something that could be criticized.

That lack of analysis is the real scandal.