CorpBlawg

Ambiguous yes, ghostblogging no

May 2nd, 2007 | Corporate Blogging, Fake Blogs, Ghostblogging, Gourmet Station, Scuderi Group, Thompson Holidays, TiVo, Wal-Mart | No Comments

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.

Ghostblogging reaches Dilbert

Apr 30th, 2007 | Corporate Blogging, Ghostblogging, Other Stuff | No Comments

via smg

Most company blogs are ghostwritten?

Apr 20th, 2007 | Corporate Blogging, Ghostblogging, Microsoft | 2 Comments

Geert D, a trade marketing manager at Microsoft, has an interesting post about Marc Bresseel, another Microsofter who has recently launched a blog. Geert quotes Bresseel as saying about his blog:

It is not ghostwritten like most corporate blogs; it’s authentic and hand made.

I’m a little intrigued by this evaluation. Is it merely Bresseel’s impression that many corporate blogs are ghostwritten, or is there any concrete evidence that would support such a claim? Do we both interpret the term ghostwriting in the same way, or possibly with different connotations?

I have no doubt at all that many corporate blogs, especially those dedicated to marketing and PR as well as executive blogs, see significant editing before they are published. But editing is not the same as ghostwriting. Putting it radically, I think letting someone else write your blog as a CEO is no different than to have someone else give newspaper interviews under your name. There is no betting way to wreck your credibility if you’re found out, plus your ghostwriter could publish something you don’t agree with - at least that’s my take. Opinions?

Authorship matters

Sep 27th, 2006 | CEO Blogging, Corporate Blogging, Debbie Weil, Ghostblogging | 8 Comments

Here’s a comment I just wrote as a response to Debbie Weil, who recently (among other things) discussed ghostblogging, i.e. the approach of having someone else write your CEO blog.

(Edit: this post, to which Weil refers, and the discussion that follows is really what this is all about.)

I believe that the debate about whether or not ghostblogging is acceptable is closely related to the importance of blog authorship in general. Let’s start by revisiting a few basic questions.

What are blogs not good for?

From the way they are used by most people, it seems blogs are not good for providing purely informative content that is largely independent of a specific context and derives its authority from an institution (in contrast to an individual). Examples for such writings would be legal texts, official documents, instruction manuals and - to a certain extent - press releases. Who the author is and in what context a piece was written (in terms of time, place and social situation) should not be reflected closely by the text, otherwise it cannot serve the purpose its users assign it (resolving a dispute, confirming your identity, figuring out how your toaster works, etc). A blog is also not independent of its individual author, which is precisely what these texts intend to be. Instruction manuals usually don’t credit the writer because they are meant to be used, not read to gain a better understand of who the author is.

Simplifying a whole lot, blogs are the direct opposite of these text types. Not only are they usually not meant to be “used” in any way, but they also tend to be more argumentative than informative and more subjective than universally objective. Just compare an entry on Wikipedia with any random blog post and check how often the personal pronoun “I” shows up - it’s usually 0 vs. a lot. The author of an encyclopedia entry will seek to stay as far “behind the scenes” as possible, because the article should not be about him, but about the topic described.

So what are blogs good for, then? From what I’ve seen, they primarily serve a social function. They allow me to meet Debbie Weil, Robert Scoble and Jonathan Schwartz in their own virtual living-room, furnished to their own individual taste, while I’m sitting right here in my office at the University of Duesseldorf. The fact that I can not only read what they have to say but actually respond and have a conversation with them is something that was unimaginable before the advent of blogging. There’s just one little catch: I have to know who I’m talking to. Because if I don’t, this miracle of communication unconstrained by time and space disappears in a big puff of smoke, as there is simply no level of trust, depth or relationship that can grow between me and an anonymous voice. Which is fine if the text in question is purely informative or instructional, but not if it’s supposed to tell me who the writer is, in his own language.

Now, you could argue that this is not the case with a ghostwritten blog - it has an author after all, just that he’s not the person under whose name things are published. True, but the problem remains that if people become aware of the disparity, they will probably find it unacceptable. Keep in mind that on the net authorship can never be validated in the same way that it is possible in person, and therefore any form of deception is likely to irreparably damage trust once it is discovered. And if that happens, you’re going to wish you’d never started a blog at all.

“But it works for ghostwritten speeches!”, you might contend. Yes, but do those really serve a social function? Do they necessarily reflect beliefs, goals and ideas which belong to the individual delivering the speech? Are they directed at individual people or crowds?

Blogs aren’t (good) megaphones, they’re fireside chats. And who you’re chatting with is at least as important as what they have to say.