Measuring failure with Edelman and Walmart

If there is one good piece of news to come out of the disgusting Edelman/Walmart affair it is this: With any luck, someone out there is measuring Walmart's reputation and realizing that fake blogs and trickery are not effective PR tactics.  I know we are measuring Edelman's reputation and it's not being helped by any of this.  Ultimately both organizations will only learn from their failures if they actually lose business from all of this. Sadly the  chances of Walmart suffering lost sales from a kerfuffle in the blogosphere are slim to none. Nonetheless, I maintain that the what this whole affair points out is that there is a culture in certain PR agencies that anything goes as long as it gets the client "good press."  That culture starts at the top, and whatever mid-level PR flack takes the blame for all this, somehow got the notion that violating WOMMA guidelines would be okay with his/her boss.
The bigger issue here, is that you become what you measure, as we always say. And if you measure success based on clip books --  or whatever the blog equivalent is -- full of happy news stories -- you will do anything to generate such stories.  The more column inches the better, right? Look where it got them!
Instead of looking at clip books, they should be looking at relationship measures like trust, integrity, honesty etc. Both Edelman and Walmart might learn something by doing some real research on what a lack of transparency and blatant media manipulation does to ones trust index.  But that takes too much time effort and energy, apparently.