Ambiguous yes, ghostblogging no
Have a look at this bit on alleged ghostblogging, recently posted by Bryan Person and at the comments by Eric Eggertson and Michael O’Connor Clarke. A discussion has unfolded around the status of a blog maintained by engine maker Scuderi Group, after Person pointed out that the blog in question is written by Scuderi’s PR firm Topaz Partners. Quote Person:
I question 1) whether it’s PR’s place to do the actual blogging for a client in the first place (my take: it’s not) 2) why the ghostblogging isn’t at least disclosed. On this blog, none of the posts includes an author’s name, so we really don’t know who’s doing the writing. The About page, which hasn’t yet been updated, also doesn’t offer any clues.
After reading this I headed over to airhybridblog.com to inspect the object of scorn. What I found left me fairly underwhelmed though, because it’s simply ad copy published via a blogging software. Not only is it safe to say that there is quite a bit of for-client blogging going on in the corporate world, but the practice of not identifying the author is fairly common as well. A good example that I can produce off the top of my head is the Thompson Holiday Blog, others are RESCUE bugBlog and Inside Nike Basketball. Note that these are not necessarily written by PR companies (I doubt the Thompson Blog is) but that the material published in them is clearly product-related ad copy with no identifiable author that could just as well be printed in a brochure.
In these cases and in that of airhybridblog.com the author is simply left unidentified. However, the consensus seems to be that the term ghostblogging describes cases where someone is identified as the author but someone else actually does the writing (as in ghostwriting, the parent term). A different variant (used by TiVo and Gourmet Station, among others) is to name a fictional character as the author of your blog. Again it makes sense to regard this as a distinct approach - fiction blogging if you may - and not lump it together with ghostblogging, as the goals behind these different approaches are all markedly different. It is hard to see anon-blogging, as in the case of airhybridblog.com, as a very deceptive practice, because the authorship of someone at the company is implied but not made explicit in any way. Of course companies utilize the status of blogs as a genre of personal writing with absolute clarity about the associations that most people have: that blogs are personal, involved, honest etc. If you have a look at Cox Communications’ Digital Straight Talk, you’ll find that it cites exactly these qualities (my favorite quote from their about page is still [w]hile we provide a Cox point of view, we also shoot for a balanced discussion that’s light on bull and heavy on substance) while providing no author for the bulk of posts, most of which are instead simply attributed to ‘DST’ (=Digital Straight Talk). The deceptive element lies in how frequently opinions are expressed in Digital Straight Talk, because when someone tells us that satellite TV sucks we expect to know who is making the claim and for what reason. In contrast to this, airhybridblog.com is ad copy so prototypical and stale that it is hard to imagine anyone could mistake it for a bloggy blog (i.e. a blog in accord with the genre criteria that most of us apply).
A few linguistic observations:
1. Syntactically The Scuderi Group and other inanimate or abstract subjects dominate in posts on airhybridblog.com. In bloggy blogs the personal pronoun I is usually chosen and even in anonymous blogs we (as in “we, the company”) is normally used to imply some kind of human involvement. Using the company name as frequently as done in airhybridblog.com is as overtly non-bloggish as I can imagine.
2. Sentences are long and have a high noun density that translates into a high information load. Complex sentences full of fluff typical PR poetry are very frequent:
But the sunny weather outside isn’t preventing a steady stream of automotive engineers, executives, and interested onlookers from stopping by Booth 1502 inside the 2.4 million square foot Cobo Center, where it’s a constant 70 degrees and a virtual world unto itself.
If I’ve ever seen a highly planned and carefully crafted sentence that seeks to cram a maximum of digestible information into an appealing linguistic wrapper it’s this one. Who’d confuse that for a personal blog?
3. The bulk of entries in airhybridblog.com seem to report events or refer to news item, with very little commentary. Where there’s no personal involvement there’s no voice and thus little need to identify an author, since we’re not too likely to care who produced such a text.
What it boils down to is the difference between a genre and a publishing technology - and the ability of blogs to function as either of these things. A press release is still a press release, whether it’s printed in a company brochure or etched into a stone tablet in cuniform. As noted above, companies know what associations people have with blogs as a genre and PR agencies seek to exploit these expectations (and why shouldn’t they). But there really isn’t a lot of deception here once one actually reads any of the texts - you know at once that you’re not having a conversation with another person and quite possibly you won’t even mind.
An example that I find much more deceptive - so deceptive, in fact, that I doubt there is any other function than to mislead the reader about who is doing the writing - is this gem. Read carefully and you will find that Edelman employs very creative individuals (more so than Topaz Partners, I would argue) and that the term editing is quite broad semantically.
