Who ever would have thought that one of the real early adopters in corporate blogging would be Wal*Mart?

Well they are: Checkoutblog.com

Their corporate blog is not written by a senior executive a la GM or Boeing but a by a gang of buyers - who let it all hang out. Like many or all new bloggers in the corporate world - speaking the unvarnished truth was not the first step that Wal*Mart took: (NYT)

This is not Wal-Mart’s first plunge into the blogosphere. Several years ago, when the retailer’s public relations problems began to mount, it turned to the Web for relief. It created one blog, Working Families for Wal-Mart, to trumpet the chain’s accomplishments and ding its critics. It created another, Wal-Marting Across America, to highlight the good deeds and productive careers of Wal-Mart employees.

Critics dismissed both as thinly veiled extensions of Wal-Mart’s P.R. department, and Wal-Mart shut them down.

The lesson seemed clear: create an authentic blog or don’t create a blog at all.

Wal-Mart employees began developing Check Out (subtitled “Where the Lanes Are All Open”) a year ago and recruited a handful of buyer-bloggers last fall, giving them rudimentary training on how to post their writing, upload videos and create hyperlinks.

The focus of the Web site, the novice bloggers decided, would be electronics, given the reliable appetite for gadget reviews and news on the Web, with a sprinkling of posts on the environment, toys and furniture.

After heeding the lessons of Wal-Mart’s earlier blogs and consulting with several well-known bloggers from sites like the Huffington Post, the buyers decided the site would succeed only if they wrote in their own voice, free from censorship and corporate review.

“Readers can tell if people are being genuine or monitored,” said Alex Cook, the merchandise manager for Wal-Mart’s entertainment division, who blogs about computers and electronics (and who wrote the lukewarm review of Windows Vista).

Anil Dash, a blogger at Six Apart, which makes blogging software, said the evolution in Wal-Mart’s thinking about blogs was typical. “You start with this total lockdown, suits read everything, one post a month model,” he said. “Then you evolve. A year later, you get one that is more open. A year after that, they start to do something that is far more authentic.”

Mr. Dash said Wal-Mart’s decision to let buyers do the blogging reflected a growing recognition that “trying to control who can speak and what they can say does not work.”

Mr. Agarwal said the company had no problems with any of the posts so far. “If you are a vendor and you talk to your Wal-Mart buyer all the time, you are going to know their likes and dislikes anyway,” he said.

I think that this is wonderful - there is really no excuse for others not to take this step now. What is this doing to the culture inside? Some one really put a stake in the ground and has created the kind of space where it is safe for these folks to do this - I would love to hear more.

For me now the issue is not “What” I think that we know the What. It is “How” How do organizations who have made control their bible allow themselves to allow this?