Expanding on authorship, trust and Wal-Mart

It feels a bit like a shameless plug, but in the light of the recent Wal-Mart blog scandal I can’t resist revisiting my previous post on blog authorship and trust. My older post focused on ghostblogging, i.e. the process of having someone other than the perpetrated author – often a professional writer – publish your executive blog for you.

The Wal-Mart situation is different, but the fallout appears to be even more severe than the opinions regarding ghostblogging, where there is a lively debate on whether or not such a practice is acceptable, considering that not all CEOs are natural writers and that executives in general have little spare time for blogging.

But there is a striking similarity. In both cases it is not about who is blogging, but whether or not that person is really who he or she claims to be.

Why is that such an important issue?

Blogs are feedback media, in contrast to other channels used by institutions to communicate with the public. They allow me to respond as an individual to another individual who represents the institution through everything he says (and even through what he doesn’t say). Institutions are incapable of communicating one-to-one, so I’m not talking to Dell when I post a comment on Direct2Dell, I’m talking to Lionel Menchaca or Mike Gray (sadly they have no profile page that I can link to).

Because I can’t directly respond to non-feedback media such as television ads, brochures or traditional websites, they are consequently less valuable for trust-building than blogs are. Trust is about knowing another person. That is not to say that trust cannot be placed in institutions, but only that process of trust-building involves actual people on both ends of the equation.

Bloggers and their readers have a symmetrical relationship: both sides can express themselves and expect to be heard. But because corporations are accustomed to non-feedback media – which are asymmetrical for technical reasons – they sometimes fail to acknowledge the loss of the absolute authority that characterizes monologues. Another aspect is that of communicative (=social) competence. Readers treat a blog like a conversation, so they look for the same things one would look for in a face-to-face exchange. Is the other person listening to me? Do they understand what I’m saying? Do they care? When you agree with something the person you are talking to is saying, you might nod or otherwise express your agreement nonverbally. Since blogs lack a nonverbal component, other means must be found to express the same things, which is why we often use emoticons in text-based communication. The lack of an extra-textual dimension, along with the fact that we don’t usually know a blog’s author in person, makes it immensely hard to build a degree of trust as it exists between people who know each other “in real-life”.

So how does this relate to Wal-Mart? Wal-Marting Across America‘s Jim and Laura are real people, the wrath of the blogosphere had nothing to do with their identity per se, or with their communicative competence, but with the fact that they were paid by Edelman and chose to withhold this from their readers. But, as with ghostblogging, the problem is not who the blogger is, the problem is whether he is up front about it. In a feedback medium that allows a symmetrical exchange, I expect to talk to an actual person, and because of all the interactual clues which are missing as we’re not talking face-to-face, I am likely to be skeptical whether the other person is what he claims to be. And if he is not because there is something relevant to the exchange which he is keeping from me – such as who is paying his salary – everything else that person has done to build a relationship with me is automatically called into question.

The people behind Wal-Marting Across America have failed to acknowledge that blogs are text-based social interaction. Anything you keep from your readers will come to haunt you, any hidden knowledge that you have eventually becomes a liability.

Of course I’m not the first one to point this out, but the reasons why trust is even more paramount in blogging and the realization that it is absolutely tied to authentic authorship should be important to anyone blogging in an institutional context.