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IT'S BECOME A CLICHÉ TO SAY that the Web has changed all the rules about how merchants and companies deal with the public. The many ways consumers can receive content — TV, Web video, blogs, search, podcasts and even gaming — seem to be in constant upheaval. This can create the impression that there are no best practices, or in fact even no rules for getting a message out to the masses. Whatever might work is worth trying.

Well, maybe there's one rule: Don't lie.

Or two: Don't get caught.

Retailer Wal-Mart broke both those rules recently, and probably should have its Web 2.0 privileges pulled for a good while.

Here's what happened. A blog was launched on the Web in late September, ostensibly authored by a couple who were traveling around America spending their nights in Wal-Mart parking lots while they documented the colorful cavalcade of people they met. The couple, identified on the site only as Jim and Laura, supposedly were struck by the number of RVs they found parked in a Wal-Mart lot in Arizona and wanted to write about the phenomenon for an RV magazine.

So they contacted an organization called Working Families for Wal-Mart to get clearance for the project. They got it and began chronicling their travels online in a blog, “Wal-Marting Across America.” And amazingly, many of the nicest people they meet en route turned out to be Wal-Mart employees, who were uniformly helpful, cheerful and happy to work for their company.

Or maybe not so amazing. As it turns out, Jim and Laura pretty much worked for the company too. As BusinessWeek first revealed, Wal-Mart didn't just offer the pair a parking space for the night; it also paid for their RV, paid their travel expenses and arranged to have their trip grow from a relatively short Pennsylvania-to-North-Carolina excursion into a trek from Las Vegas to Georgia.

Both their van and their blog carried a prominent logo indicating sponsorship by Working Families for Wal-Mart. But the site had no explanation of what that group stood for, what that sponsorship meant and the fact that it was a paid sponsorship. In fact, it's an advocacy group set up last December by Wal-Mart's PR firm Edelman to counteract the bad press the company has gotten from union-funded watchdog groups over its pay levels, healthcare policies, alleged failure to promote female employees to management positions, and so on.

As BusinessWeek recounts, the blog carried stories about most of these issues, always painting Wal-Mart in a favorable light. One employee expressed gratitude for the company health policy that paid for his son's expensive heart-disease treatments. A woman traces her rise through the company from cashier to manager. One post even sang the praises of the company's prices for organic milk.

Laura identified herself to BusinessWeek as a freelance writer. Her partner refused to give his full name or story, but within 48 hours it was revealed that he was a staff photographer for The Washington Post. (The successful sleuth reportedly was one of those same watchdog groups.)

Upshot: The Post made Jim take his photo off the blog and pay back $2,200, his half of the expense money for the trip. The journey itself ended two weeks and 43 blog entries after it began. And the blog has come down, except for a final snippy post from Laura explaining the Wal-Mart sponsorship and laying the bad publicity at the feet of “an organized Wal-Mart opposition group.”

“I did this blog because I thought it would make a great story,” Laura writes. “Jim did this because we live together…We weren't out there as representatives of our employers, or anybody at all but ourselves.”

Put aside the Olympic-caliber ethical leap of two people — professional journalists, no less — maintaining that accepting money for producing content doesn't put them in a severely compromised position regarding their subject. That's between Jim and Laura and their respective consciences. Focus instead on how quickly this scam was uncovered, and the vehemence of the reaction against Wal-Mart. The story moved from BusinessWeek to The New York Times, and from there to cable news and the financial programs.

The only thing that seemed to knock it out of the spotlight was a court decision requiring Wal-Mart to pay its Pennsylvania workers $79 million to compensate for rest breaks they were forced to skip. That's not the kind of help you want to reach for to put out a publicity brush fire.

Edelman's blogging efforts on Wal-Mart's behalf have turned sour before. A New York Times story last March reported that an Edelman staffer was e-mailing pro-Wal-Mart news to sympathetic bloggers and encouraging them to put those opinions into their blogs — in their own words, of course. The scheme drew notice when some of the bloggers omitted that crucial step and reprinted the e-mails verbatim.

The problem isn't restricted to Wal-Mart, of course, or even to large multinationals that can afford to hire marquee PR firms. A new service called PayPerPost.com is offering to match companies with bloggers who will blog about them in return for cash. Companies get to post blogging “opportunities” on the Web site, along with a per-post offer price. They also get to specify whether they will pay only for positive write-ups.

PayPerPost bloggers, for their part, are under no obligation to disclose that they've been reimbursed in any way for their coverage. All they need is a blog that's more than 90 days old with no gaps larger than a month, keep the post up for 30 days and write in English.

Remember, this is not bloggers monetizing their content by selling ad space. This is direct pay for content. And I suspect there'll be damn few advertisers willing to pay for unfavorable mentions.

Jim and Laura: I smell another great story opportunity — at about $25 a post.

Blogs matter as vehicles for molding public perception; Wal-Mart thought enough of the channel to fake one. If Wal-Mart's blogging example or PayPerPost's blog-for-bucks business model gain any traction at all, then the right approach to corporate blogging won't be an issue any more. Credibility in the blog medium will be so low that corporations and marketers will be able to ignore it completely.