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.

Anyway, here’s my list of deceased corporate blogs, ordered by degree of their putrefaction (last post in brackets):

#1 Ray Ozzie, Microsoft (1 April 2006)

I’m sure MS’s chief technologist is hella busy, but so is Jonathan Schwartz and he has been posting steadily for years. Ray went into the corner after just 6 rounds (or posts) and he’s been catching his breath since April. Methinks the introduction of Vista should have given him plenty to blog about. Was blogging just a plug for Live Spaces? What does Scoble think (I’m just curious, honest)?

#2 QuickBooks Online Edition – The Team Blog, Intuit (9 May 2006)

Silent since May, though the record was good before that. After about a year, maybe all questions on QuickBooks Online had been answered? We’ll never know – they didn’t even say goodbye.

#3 Things That Make You Go Wireless, Sprint (9 Jul 2006)

Sprint replaced their blog with with a podcast (the link points there now). Probably not a bad choice for them.

#4 The Bocada Blog, Bocada (28 Jul 2006)

A prototypical example for an abandoned blog: 181 words, 17 sentences, 4 posts in total in 2 months – then nothing. What went wrong?

#5 TiVo Blog, TiVO (18 Aug 2006)

There should be plenty for these guys to blog about, if you consider what is happening with television at the moment. But they’ve been MIA for four months, after only 11 posts. Maybe allowing comments would have made things more lively.

#6 Mena Trott, Six Apart (30 Aug 2006)

Considering what Six Apart does, Mena’s prolonged silence might seem a bit ironic. Is she too busy enabling other people’s blogging to blog herself? No, she isn’t, she just likes it better over on Vox. She does seem to have given up on strictly corporate blogging though. Any reason, Ms. Trott?
I’m jealous of you, by the way. You’re just two months older than me and you have both been to Tokyo and live in the Bay Area, two things I’m still working on. Watch out, I’m on your heels.

#7 Dan Socci, HP (12 Sep 2006)

The only one on the list that has not just been abandoned, but deleted. See archive.org for proof of its passing. No worries Dan, your five posts are safe for posterity in my indestructible linguistic database. Your blog on “HP’s industry leading support services which provide innovative support of HP products and also help customers manage their IT environment operations more efficiently across all vendor platforms” may be gone, but it is not forgotten. And believe me, in my statistics all those juicy adjectives make a nice dent under “suasive language”.

#8 Tom Bishop, BMC Software (3 Sep 2006)

The CTO of business software maker BMC apparently has business elsewhere.

#9 Kate Purmal, U3 (20 Sep 2006)

Maybe Kate ran out of reasons why U3 Smart Drives are great? Sorry, I just couldn’t resist. It’s simply astonishing how she managed to mention the company product in virtually every single post.

#10 Nokia N90 Blog, Nokia (26 September 2006)

The blurb on the site states: “Here you will find blogger and media information that you can repurpose and utilize in your blog postings about the N90“. It may have enough for a catalogue, but not enough for a blog. Perhaps to keep a marketing blog running, you need something with more contextual longevity than just the product? She’s still blogging…

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