Social Media Club Initiative on Blogging Ethics

October 25th, 2006 at 2:45 pm

Thank you Mike. I am sorry you weren’t feeling well this past week, but very glad to know you are ok and hopefully attending tonight. This is such an important topic, I am really looking forward to bubbling up the real best practices here and figuring out what should be done as a community. Including the voices of bloggers, journalists and everyone else concerned with getting the most from Social Media.

This is just the start of our conversation. I suspect it will be a topic at the Social Media Club meeting in New York tomorrow (over 60 people registered so far) and in DC and Boston next week. It would be great if we could announce something more substantial by our Web 2point2 Unconference here in San Francisco on November 9 & 10, but that may just be too soon.

October 25th, 2006 at 3:08 pm

Greed eventually ruins everything. I’m actually surprised it took as long as it did for things like PayPerPost to crop up. Although to be honest I don’t have a problem with paid posts, as long as there is disclosure.

I love this web site, but honestly TC’s blatant advertising of their own products (e.g. edgeio) bothers me more than a paid post in some other random blog. Mainly because TC has such a huge influence. When you have that much power, conflict of interest is much more dangerous. IMHO

October 25th, 2006 at 3:34 pm

Thanks for covering this Mike, it’s an important topic and this is one of the most important topics on the Social Media Club agenda these days….well this as well as the new template for the social media press release.

October 25th, 2006 at 4:04 pm

I definitely think there’s a lot of need for this, not just because of the Wal Mart blog, LonelyGirl15 or pay to post (which hurt business for all of us for obvious reasons) but also, A LOT of companies (especially in tech) are pushing very hard to get PR firms to get them into blogs and few seem to understand that there’s a double edge sword in it when a blog isn’t high authority - and little deciphers the difference.

As somebody who owns a site that combines editorial content with user driven blog content (my site more or less started as a blog, i guess), I would definitely like to see some guidelines and policing on it, so good going you guys!

I’m in LA - so I can’t be of much help to attend

October 25th, 2006 at 4:33 pm

bloggers are journalists? I agree that all journalists can be bloggers, but all bloggers are not journalists. Sure a blogger can have an opinion on the topic, but IMHO his opinion won’t have much credibility unless that blogger is also a journalist. Just because you can opine about something, or “report” something doesn’t qualify one as a journalist.

I guess this has some merit for bloggers, like yourself, that want to be viewed as something more than random voices bloviating about whatever topic fancy’s their interest.

Frankly I think there is more credibility with bloggers in the political space than there is with bloggers in the tech space. Bloggers in the political space seem to care less about their “stature” and what their peers think of them, unlike the tech space. If could trust the fact that a tech blogger doesn’t really care about being “first” or how many readers he has, or what his position is on Digg, Techmeme, or how to get on the mythical “A list”, I would give them much more respect and credibility.

October 25th, 2006 at 9:01 pm

I think this is a great topic to me. As a former public auditor and someone who has worked on SoX topics for a few years, ethics and trust factor are something I never seem to want to stop discussing.

I wrote a post about when is the appropriate time to remove comments here: http://www.centernetworks.com/.....-a-comment

I would certainly love to know Mike’s thoughts on this topic since it appears from what I hear that comments get removed all over the place on TC. I do find the timing for this post interesting considering the ValleyWag bashing this week.

I also agree with #4 Sean about the fact that as a blog/newspaper/person grows in popularity, their trust factor must rise as well. Frankly if TC wants to have 100 paid ad posts a day so be it, its your site and you can do as you please, but it would be great to have a disclaimer at the top “this is an ad” or something to that effect. Otherwise, us as readers wonder about the ethics and trust. And it isn’t just here, it’s everywhere. And the truth is that most of what we all say on our blogs is replicated on 100 other blogs, so trust and rep is the key to making tc better than x that’s better than y. The bottom line is that people trust with the utmost regard what is said on this blog/site/board.

As it was said so well on the tv show the Honeymooners, “You better be really nice to everyone on the way up, because you will see those same people on the way down!”

I think one of the keys is to figure out what a disclaimer looks like, and when to use it. I would be very interested in having a discussion with you Michael if you are interested.

TC, GigaOm, RWW, Mashable, etc. all have a huge responsibility to do the right thing. I am sure their brains hurt half of the time managing the conflicts. In one of her books, Judge Judy Sheindlin says, “if you always tell the truth you don’t need a good memory.” Wonder if that can work for blogs as well.

October 26th, 2006 at 7:14 am

There is a saying. Companies don’t own their brands, their customers do. The company is just the steward. This isn’t something that just happened. It has been a fact for a long time. Marketers are just now waking up to the fact. Some like it and embrace it, since it makes for a better more meaningful experience with the comsumer. Others don’t. They perceive their powerbase is eroding.

Mistakes are going to happen. We are human and make mistakes. As a WOMMA Ethics committee member, we (the members of WOMMA at large, as well as, my Ethics Committee peers) are committed to delivering not just thought leadership in this area but also a strong set of standards.

Oddly, most marketers think that the best marketing must be manufactured to be compelling. Social marketing shows us that when done right, a slice of real life can be just as effective if not more so.

Not every employee at every agency understands what this means. If an agency employee hasn’t been made privy to WOMMA’s standards and the employee if focused on creating a compelling tactic and honesty of information is missing (for whatever reason) from the strategy. What happened in the Wal-Marting across America is more likely to happen than not.

I believe that it is important for bloggers to keep a watchful eye on this space so that agencies don’t get away with avoiding standards such as WOMMA’s ethics code or worse yet, duping innocent consumers with shills and bogus/deceptive tactics. I also believe that as responsible marketers, we must focus on training, quality and staying aligned with a set of standards. By doing these two things, everybody will win and social marketing will flourish.

October 26th, 2006 at 9:26 am

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Thanks for the initiative on this, Mike, Chris. I’m at the Adobe MAX conference in Las Vegas today, and cannot attend tonight’s SF meeting, but would like to pursue this. I was struck by this paragraph of yours:

“But the friction destruction and market efficiency qualities of the Internet are leading blogs in particicular to face a serious credibility challenge, and I believe this must be dealt with in a direct and open manner. The WOMMA guidelines are a good start, but I think more practical and far reaching advice is also needed. I also think that we need more than a set of principles. There have to be consequences when journalists stray.”

That last line is the key… we need to tighten the feedback loop between actions and consequences. This seems like it would require some type of net-based social system, but as we’ve clearly seen already, social systems can be gamed… tough problem.

I don’t think “bloggers” are worse than “journalists” here… Walter Duranty for Ukraine, Walter Cronkite for Tet, Jordan Eason for Baghdad… these examples prove that we’re all just meatpuppets, always have been, and we do mess up. The difference now is that there are more voices who find it cheaper and faster to talk, so we need to find a way to dial-out the shady motormouths.

How to tighten the feedback loop between actions and consequences… if there’s a followup meeting, with effective discourse control, then I’d like to participate in this goal with you, thanks.

jd

October 27th, 2006 at 9:51 am

I’m surprised that nobody has brought up the WOMMA Ethics Assessment Tool (the “20 Questions”) devised early this week. Was WOMMA’s ethics work discussed, or dismissed out of hand as a “good start.”

Rather than try to recreate the wheel, why hasn’t Michael and Chris brought in the WOMMA Ethics people to help come up with common solutions for everyone? These are some of the foremost experts on the topic, so it makes sense that they should be included. I agree that Chris and Michael are both “good guys”, but so are Andy Sernovitz, Jim Nail, Michael Wiley, and Steve Hershberger.

Disclosure — I used to work at WOMMA and remain friends with everyone there. I’m not privy to anything going on behind-the-scenes, but still remain interested in these issues.