The several comments about #5 — ghost blogging — pique my interest. Yes, ideally, the claimed author of each post should actually have written it.

However, if a CEO or other top exec isn’t a good writer, I don’t have a problem with in-house PR or other marketing communications pro editing, cleaning up, making suggestions back to the author, etc. — as long as the points, words and focus are predominantly the author’s. Of course, that gets subjective and into gray areas, but still honest, ethical practitioners will make a good faith effort to counsel and edit without taking authorship.

As others have pointed out, a multi-author blog is a great idea for a company, and it relieves the pressure of the CEO or any one person to maintain it.

My biggest fear is for ghost-writing. I’ve seen too many comments on PR discussion groups where they relate ghost blogging to speech writing, news release writing and other traditional communication work where you do ghost write.

Time and time again, I say that the medium dictates the changed rules. I’m just afraid that, as social media grows, honesty and transparency will fall by the wayside.
-Mike

Dave,

I’m going to go out on a limb and be a bit of a dissenter here re: #5: ghost blogging. I think Mike is generally correct in stating that when it comes to mass media, the medium indeed attempts to dictate what is considered acceptable.

However, if the blogging community at large, which is truly still in it’s infancy, has decided that the platform absolutely, positively HAS to be written by the head of a firm, or by a marketing person, or whoever is the apparent “face” of the company, then I would argue those dictating such policies are dead wrong.

And the reason for my opinion is that because we have to remember that blogging isn’t always just about a single person. Sure it might have started out that way, but as the platform has matured and gained greater adoption by an audience outside its early adopters, the guiding principles of the platform too must adapt.

We’re no longer writing about last night’s party with friends, or how much we really dig our cat, we’re writing about business, politics, religion and a host of other things that are WAY larger than the individual. Twitter, on the other hand ( which I wouldn’t call micro-blogging ), but rather public texting, IS probably the closest thing to a truly individual platform for the moment.. And I completely understand the concept of a Twtter ID being tied to a real person, as part of this concept.

But blogging is different. And it’s value to business, particularly small businesses without giant marketing budgets and staffs is huge from an SEO and SEM perspective. So how then, does a small business owner. . .even one bringing in 5-50 million dollars a year. . . put together a blog? She’s often not a techie, or a writer, and ( some might find this hard to believe ) not in possession of a tremendous amount of time. . .so how do they do it? How can this individual, who is creating opportunities for many others to earn a livelihood and contribute to society, create a blog, if “bloggers” ( and I use this term very loosely ) are telling them they CAN’T put out a blog because they themselves aren’t writing it? Hogwash.

The platform has gone beyond the individual. The story, then is ALSO much larger than than the individual. To make companies accountable to a standard that requires them to have a single person with a face and a name being the only one responsible for blogging is not only unrealistic, it’s dangerous.

Here are two examples that might help to put things into perspective:

Some years ago, when I was a door-knockin’ sales guy peddling forklifts ( go figure ), I was creating marketing collateral that helped my territory prospects remember who I was when the time came to buy a lift truck. It had my picture on it, my cell phone number. . .I even offered some sort of promotion that I was going to offer straight of of my commission.

Now, from my point of view ( that of the individual sales guy ), it made sense. After all, it was a territory I built from scratch, ( my ) prospects wanted to speak with ME, a “person” not a “company”, ( I thought ), and the commission was mine to give away. . . or not, right?

Uh, maybe not. The dealer, a gentleman with his own business-sense, ( and a multi-million dollar company to back it up ), didn’t agree. To him, it was troublesome because it was ME who was becoming the product and not the FIRM. . .the FIRM that he built from scratch, and would continue to run and brand for decades after I was gone.

At the time, I thought he was a bit off, but after more reflection I understood his point. After all, I wasn’t going to be around forever. . . and because he was trying to build a brand in a new market, I was effectively diluting that brand and creating my own! I was “Doc Kane, the forklift guy”, not “that local rep from YALE”, which is what HE needed to have his messaging say.

So, it wasn’t the medium, in this case that was dictating the proper behavior, because you see this sort of thing in various industries like real estate, for example, it was the larger entity that was most important. . .his business. . his brand.

This is critical.

Here’s another example: A client of mine said off the cuff the other day that his firm really wanted to put together a blog, but couldn’t find the time to do it. They’re a professional services firm with a need to demonstrate thought leadership on an ongoing basis, and when competing with the big boys for dollars and eyeballs, they need to be deft in their approach. Without hesitation, I suggested we could do it for them. After all, we have a bevy of writers with a variety of expertise that do exactly this. So why not, right? I didn’t even think that could be an issue, until I read this comment. But even still, I believe it is the right thing to suggest for my client, and the right thing to do for them.

Small and medium businesses (SMB) need to leverage the web these days. They have to. …and they have to do it without the backing of public or private investors, and without a large marketing and communications staff. It would be very unfortunate if we as a community were to set what I think are arbitrary rules for blogging that have little relevance to the person trying to run a business in today’s day and age.

Let’s always keep in mind that blogging, and communicating isn’t always a one-on-one conversation. On the contrary, it’s often one-to-many, and if we apply our single-vision lens to the topic at hand we’re almost always going to miss this critical point.

Cheers,
Doc
@dockane

I read Ike’s post yesterday (he DM’d me his self-professed “shot over the bow”) and while I’ll say I’m a TweetDeck user (having first graduated from browser, then TwitterFox), I have a few thoughts that might be useful in the screening process:
1) Why do you feel you’re qualified to introduce my company to social media in general, and Twitter specifically?
2) What are your personal strategies for monitoring and tracking key topics or influentials within your own space?
3) Describe some failures, or initiatives that weren’t as successful as they could have been.
4) How much time to you dedicate to nurturing your community and managing your reputation?

Thanks for the opportunity! Heather

Many excellent comments that need no addendum, but I will add this: Transparency is where it’s at, so if a CEO/executive management can’t or won’t write, then why not create podcast blog series – interview the darn folk each week and let their personalities shine (or pester, whatever works). Marketing and PR professionals don’t control the message any longer, so we need to do what we can to get our leader’s “voice” out there. And if we don’t feel our leader’s “voice” should be out there, then why the hell are they leading us?

Twitter me @kwg4now (I’m not a big mouth)

These 8 questions will haunt lot of people.

Dave, very good list of questions to try and “out” the posers. Good job categorizing the major perps–excitable folks who got SM religion now bloviating as self-proclaimed experts and traditional communications experts jumping into the deep end of the social media pool without their water wings. The former knows the tools, the latter can build a strategy. Your “expert” should have both.

But it’s hard to evaluate the experts if you are not pretty facile yourself. If you’ve seen the truly JUNKY proposals or “strategies” that I have– by people/agencies who either rip the copy from Wikipedia definitions or by those who wouldn’t know how the work would get done other than by intimating that fairy dust was involved….

So, I would like to add another question.

#9. Give me an example of when using social media didn’t make sense for a client.

Everyone knows that these examples abound. I would want to make sure that my consultant was giving me good advice even if that means saying my cool-tool of choice is the wrong one or that it would not fit with the broader communications/service/branding/whatever strategy.

Thanks for a good post.