Archive for the ‘integrity’ Category

Asking A Lot: Diary of a Trust Fund

October 19th, 2009 by AV Flox in integrity

I remember the first time I ran for office. I was in junior high and I wanted to be vice president of the student council (Why vice and not outright president? Because while I will lead if I have to, I am a much happier right-hand woman to someone who shares my vision). That campaign highlighted the importance of being conservative with how often you ask people to support you.

THE BALLOON BOY INCIDENT

On October 15, 2009, news broke that six-year-old Falcon Heene had floated away in a balloon made by his father in Fort Collins, Colorado. The media and public were stirred into a panicked frenzy only to discover, when the balloon landed near Denver International Airport hours later, that there was no one aboard. A search for the body of the child found nothing. Heene was eventually reported to have been found hiding in a cardboard box over the garage of his family’s home. There is a criminal investigation of the Heenes underway and now many believe that the entire thing was staged to draw attention to the family’s aspirations for fame.

I don’t know what really happened in the Heene household, nor do I have any clever quips about what it all means about the state of modern society. What I do know is that the Heenes asked for our attention and support and broke our trust in them. We will never believe them again. It’s the 21st century boy who cried wolf.

THE EFFECTIVE CALL-TO-ACTION

In early January of 2009, David Armano asked the readers of his popular blog Logic+Emotion to help his family help a friend of theirs whose life had put her in a difficult position. He knew it’s not easy to ask people for donations and that that the crumbling economy made it less likely that people would contribute. His post was short and got right to the point:

I’ve been at this blog for nearly 3 years now and have never asked for something like this—I hope I’ve earned enough trust to be able to ask something back from you. Above is a picture of Daniela and her family. Brandon, age 6, Daniela, age 9 and little Evelyn age 4. Daniela is divorcing her spouse after years of abuse. In recent years her mortgage went unpaid and she’s lost her house.

As of this moment, Daniela’s family is staying at our house and we are trying to help her find a one bedroom apartment for her family to live in. With Evelyn, her youngest having Down’s Syndrome and Daniela herself being a Romanian immigrant with very little family support she literally has no one to turn to. Except us (all of us).

Daniela cleans houses when she can leave her family. I’m not even going to tell you what she gets paid—it’s obscene. Right now her options are pretty limited, aside from an apartment, there is only a group shelter. Not very pretty.

Here’s what we are asking. Right now, Belinda and I are opening our home, but it’s tight as we have no basement. We’ve committed to giving as much as we can spare, diverting funds from other places. I’m asking if you could think about doing the same. Or at the very least, helping get the word out about this. We are looking to raise 5k for Daniela and her family. Enough so that she doesn’t have to worry about a deposit or rent for a while.

I know this is the worst possible time to ask for anything…. I don’t have anything to offer back. Not an ego list or top donators directory. I can only hope that this thing we call “community” puts its money or heart where its mouth is. Please do whatever you can.

Respectfully, David and family

What happened? Donations poured in to a startling total of $16,880. David Griner summarized the forces that seemed to be at work in this unprecedented show of support. The first one is the most important, and the backbone of this post: rarity.

Armano has built himself a reputation as a brilliant commentator on business and the social web. His content is valuable to us–we tune in because we trust his judgment and insight. Secondly, he provides this information (quite often in beautifully minimalistic infographics) at no cost to us and gives us feedback on our own ideas, whether in his blog, comments section, Twitter, or Facebook. So when he asked his Twitter followers and readers to do something for him, we did it. At the time my now ex-husband was in a panic, we were liquidating all of our assets, and awaiting a financial Apocalypse that was hurtling toward us at light speed. I knew he’d have more than a word with me about throwing money at people I didn’t even know. But I didn’t hesitate.

And neither did 544 other people.

THE TRUST FUND

Every once in a while, we do need the support of our network. Maybe we need a ride to a conference in a nearby town. Maybe we’re launching a new product and we want to get buzz going. Maybe we want to see if anyone wants to buy a laptop bag we impulse bought that turned out to be too small or too big for our needs. It’s not as urgent, but the same rules apply–if your network feels your content has value, if they feel you have given them something, they’re going to do what they can to help.

My friend Damien Basile calls it The Trust Fund: “When you invest time and energy into someone you form a relationship. When this happens you create a ‘Trust Fund’ where both you and the other person either add or subtract trust from this mutual fund you have set up.” Asking for help requires trust. Do you have enough in your trust fund to make that request?

Not a single one of us is faultless, but how many of us know one person who just, oh, takes the cake Heene-style? How likely are you to stretch a helping hand the next time you see one of their tweets asking for support? Exactly.

VOTE FOR ME!

So there I was, standing in front of the school, about to give a speech about why they should vote for me. A closet introvert (surprised? Good, that means I’m doing something right), I didn’t want to address them myself, so I’d made a horse paperbag puppet. My promises were simple–we’d be able to order lunch from more franchises, I’d address the ridiculous little song we were made to sing at assembly about having a positive attitude with the principal, and so on. I’m convinced they voted for me because I was the girl who invited her whole class to her birthday parties and because I’d never asked for anything from anyone until that moment.

I won by a landslide.

So here is my point: before you consider what you’re asking, think about what you’re giving. Your space online is yours to do what you will, but be consistent in your offerings. People who read what you put out there come back time and time again because they know what they can expect from you. Yes, even if 50 percent of your tweets are conversation tidbits without much context. Be gentle in your metamorphosis–remember it’s not just you in that bus.

Engage. David Armano didn’t just put out content for three years before he asked us to help him out. He put out content and he interacted with his readers across multiple platforms. He, like most power-users of social media, know that the blog post or tweet is not a closing argument but a springboard for discussion. This is a big part of the Trust Fund. Your readers take you seriously–do you show them that you take their feed back seriously?

If you say you’re going to do something, follow through. I know this is hard, God knows I’ve dropped the ball with as much aplomb as I’ve followed through. Learn to avoid failing to follow through (or worse, having a nervous breakdown because you’re so much of everything to everyone that you’re nothing to yourself) by being selective in your commitments. Saying no is not rude, just be transparent about your limitations. And at the very least, be fast to notify people when things aren’t going to turn out as you’d promised. Time is scarce, but consideration doesn’t cost a whole lot. Take those two minutes, even if it means shooting a short text in the middle of a stressful call with a client.

EPILOGUE

Having said all this, thank you all for voting for me for the 140 Conference NOW Awards and Mashable Open Web Awards. Your submitting a vote says to me that you value my content and I am both humbled and honored by your gesture of appreciation. But you will not see me ask you to vote for me so lightly anymore.

One day, I may call upon you, my dear friends. And that day, without a doubt, you will know that what I’m asking means a lot to me. But just to make sure that you know, I promise to take the time to explain to you exactly why I need your support.

Now I ask all of you to think of your trust funds the next time you’re about to pelt your friends and readers with “vote for me” DMs. And if you absolutely must call upon me, avoid the form-letter feel of such a message and opt for e-mail. You don’t need a horse puppet and definitely not a UFO-shaped balloon, just a simple message that lets me know why this means so much.

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Paid Content: Brand Meets Blogger

September 9th, 2009 by AV Flox in blogging, integrity

New influencers like bloggers and web personalities are the new must-have for brands looking to strengthen their products in the marketplace. Word-of-mouth has come to the fore as one of the most successful ways to reach an audience, and companies are responding. This has led to the creation of a plugged-in, hyper-engaged breed of spokesperson who regularly plug products in multiple forms online media–blogs, videos, social networks, micro-blogs, etc. For their efforts, these spokespeople are compensated–economically, with products, or other opportunities.

This, perhaps, is the biggest difference between bloggers and journalists. A journalist cannot be rewarded in any way for his or her coverage, while many on the forefront of web 2.0 have worked to delineate best practices for web personalities who receive compensation (direct or indirect) for their product placement, these guidelines have not reached a consensus. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is moving to change this. Their new guidelines dictate that web personalities pitching these products are to be made liable if their claims or other content misrepresent the product or company they’re pitching.

Brian Solis, principal of FutureWorks, the award-winning PR and new media agency in Silicon Valley, wrote about the FTC’s vision for bloggers and web personalities at TechCrunch:

In a discussion with Mary Engle, the acting deputy director for the Bureau of Consumer Protection, she articulated to me, “It’s not about preventing citizen journalists from becoming citizen advertisers, that’s just not true. We’re acting to ensure that bloggers don’t create a bias in the consumer decision-making process. Consumers just need to know that what they’re reading is technically an advertisement.”

Whether the post is compensated with cash or with free product or rewards, the FTC views them equally. Engle observed, “The real test is whether or not the consumer’s impression or decision would change if they knew the post was sponsored.”

The FTC Guides advise that an advertisement employing a consumer endorsement on a central or key attribute of a product will be interpreted as representing that the endorser’s experience is representative of what consumers will generally achieve.

It’s about responsibility and credibility.

Solis believe that compensating bloggers and influencers directly or indirectly can’t but cloud their ability to be unbiased about the products they’re discussing, thereby risking their credibility and the trust of their audience.

I don’t necessarily agree. As I wrote in The Balance between Money and Credibility, I think it’s possible to endorse the brands that you believe in and maintain credibility and trust by being upfront and disclosing your relationships.

In that regard, Solis brings up important rebuttals:

If we examine Forrester’s case for sponsored conversations, we’re essentially fueling word of mouth by paying for social or topical authorities to share their views about our company or product brand in their domain. This is important. We’re talking about paying people to write about a company or product on their existing, personally-branded content platform associated with it’s already existing, captive audience. This theoretically sparks Webwide buzz that connects a brand to the community of would be customers who rely upon these personalities and voices in the both the blogosphere and statusphere to make informed decisions.

Seems simple enough, except two things are going to prevent this from effectively promoting the sponsoring brand over time — 1) disclosures read like warning signs; 2) Google is downgrading any blog or site that actively publishes paid content.

The matter of disclosures as warning signs is not unfounded. It is up to every blogger and influencer to word their disclosures so these are fair, but the association with a brand can serve to make them experts in terms of this brand’s products, which can be useful for consumers when seeking specific information. It is a blogger’s and influencer’s responsibility to be informed about the products they support. For a company, it is important to reach out to bloggers and influencers whose personal brands reflect the product they’re trying to place (and this ties in to an earlier post I wrote Pitching to Bloggers the Right Way.

Personally, I think the FTC guidelines will enable consumers to feel more secure about the reliability of the content they encounter and it will also help bloggers and influencers undertake paid conversations in a much more clear-cut manner that enables them to preserve their credibility and the trust that they have created with their respective audiences.

For those interested in the subject matter, Social Media Today will be hosting an Ethics of Blogging webinar on Thursday, September 24 at 10:00AM PT, which will discuss: transparency; web content as a marketing tool; online privacy; and compliance and legal obligations. For more information, visit their site.

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Blogger vs. Mainstream Media: Who’s Exploiting Whom?

May 19th, 2009 by AV Flox in blogging, blogging vs journalism, integrity

The internet was on fire on Sunday after Maureen Dowd, New York Times op-ed columnist, admitted she had plagiarized the work of Talking Points Memo blogger, Josh Marshall. The Huffington Post published an e-mail where Dowd admitted her error:

josh is right. I didn’t read his blog last week, and didn’t have any idea he had made that point until you informed me just now.

i was talking to a friend of mine Friday about what I was writing who suggested I make this point, expressing it in a cogent — and I assumed spontaneous — way and I wanted to weave the idea into my column. but, clearly, my friend must have read josh marshall without mentioning that to me.

we’re fixing it on the web, to give josh credit, and will include a note, as well as a formal correction tomorrow.

Unless this was an IM discussion, it’s questionable how the 43-word paragraph made it nearly verbatim into Dowd’s column, but enough crucifying of Maureen Dowd has occurred across the blogosphere, so I’m going to pass on that aspect of the discussion. What I see here is not just a case of plagiarism, but a perfectly illustrative situation of the general disrespect of mainstream media for the blogosphere.

Much has been said about the importance of mainstream media: they have the fact-checkers, resources, and the investigative teams and they are the only ones who can do the kind of unearthing that enables us to live as an informed society. Bloggers, on the other hand, are the exploiters, the ones who take the hard work of journalists everywhere and turn it into cheap (or, in most cases, free) photocopies. Shame on those bloggers, shame, shame, shame.

Except that’s not really the case. Increasingly, the exploitation is happening on the side of the mainstream media.

In February, a friend of mine, Brooks Bayne, wrote a blog post about the suspiciously massive increase in followers for select Twitter users. Evan Williams, CEO of Twitter left him a comment explaining it was a possible effect of the Suggested Users feature that Twitter had recently implemented.

A couple of days later, The LA Times’ Mark Milian picked up the story and featured William’s comment. While Milian’s piece links the original blog post, no credit is given to Bayne. Milian simply credits the comment as having appeared on “another blog post.”

I contacted Jay Rosen, professor of journalism at New York University and a champion of the blogosphere’s role in journalism, about the issue. He responded via e-mail, saying: “It happens all the time. It sucks.”

Rosen told me there was no standard for citing the information or ideas that journalists fid in blogs or new media.

“There should be,” he said.

He linked me to Can I Get A Link Please?, a site devoted to getting bloggers linked back by the mainstream publications that use their content, information, and ideas.

The blog lists a study by Brodeur released last year which reveals that over three quarters of the journalists surveyed use blogs to get story ideas, insight and angles. A piece at Taking The Blogosphere Seriously summarized the results as follows:

Nearly 70% of all reporters check a blog list on a regular basis. Over one in five (20.9%) reporters said they spend over an hour per day reading blogs. And a total of nearly three in five (57.1%) reporters said they read blogs at least two to three times a week… About half of reporters (47.5%) say they are “lurkers” – reading blogs but rarely commenting.

The majority of journalists thought blogs were having a significant impact on news reporting in all areas tested EXCEPT in the area of news quality. The biggest impact has been in speed and availability of news. Over half said that blogs were having a significant impact on the “tone” (61.8%) and “editorial direction” (51.1%) of news reporting.

Can I Get A Link Please? also features a clip from a panel at the Carnegie Counsel’s Ethics Studio featuring Rosen, in which he illustrates the importance of the link, not only in terms of attribution, but in terms of using the web as it was made to be used—to connect information.

The link—which is the idea that “you’re interested in this, but did you know about that?” Or “here is what I’m saying, but you should you see what they’re saying.” Or “you’re here but you know there is also this over there,”—is actually building out the potential of the web to link people, which is what Timothy Berners-Lee put into it in the first place. So when we link, we are expressing the ethic of the web, which is connecting people and knowledge.

… When we talk about this stereotypical conflict between the bloggers and the mainstream media—by the way, Michael, the only people who worry about whether bloggers are going to replace the news media are people who work in the news media. Nobody else talks about that.

But when we think about it, think about the news industry’s reaction to the rise of the web. When the major news sites built their first pages, which was about 1996, they decided to re-purpose their content from the print platform and put it it online, which certainly makes sense. You paid all the costs already for all the articles and features that you produced for The Washington Post newspaper, now you have this new way to distribute them, put them onoine, you get new audience, new readers… In re-purposing their content on the web, which is a rational thing, they made up some rules from themselves. One of the rules was: you don’t send people away from your domain. That is, you don’t link out from the Washington Post to the rest of the web. Because you’re the Washinton Post! You have everything… why would we send you anywhere else?

So when they decided to give birth to their first websites, their sites were actually anti-web because they didn’t understand the ethic of the link. And they didn’t accept the ethic of the link. And it’s taken them a long time to learn the ethic of the link because the Washington Post is willing to share their knowledge with you but the whole idea of connecting people to knowledge wherever it is, which is the ethic of the web, has taken them a while to understand. And so the bloggers were the people who came along and who developed the web first as a tool for informing people, because they didn’t have these rules. And they used it for what it was for.

As more publications, as more journalists get on the web with their own blogs, I hope that the practice of the link and proper attribution of bloggers improves dramatically. After all, it is an abrogation of a journalist’s responsibility to not do their due diligence in citing and crediting their sources appropriately, whether they deign take the blogosphere seriously or not.

In closing I offer another paragraph from Jay Rosen’s talk at the Carnegie Ethics Studio:

As a blogger what I try to do is do everything well, all the time and give you way more than you asked for every single time you come to my blog. More knowledge than you thought, more links than you bargained for, more nuance, more depth, more education than you imagined when you clicked that link.

Absolutely.

Of possible interest:
The Myth of the Parasitical Blogger at Salon.com by Glenn Greenwald echoes the sentiments I express in this piece, and notes a similar example of the mainstream media picking up story ideas from a blogger—in this case, his piece, which inspired an article in the Economist.

Maureen Dowd Gets a Pass, But in Journalism, Plagiarism Still Matters by BlogHer’s Kim Pearson offers the reaction to Dowd’s actions from the media as well as a list of past plagiarism scandals.

Id Maureen Dowd Guilty of Plagiarism? at TIME.com

Maureen Dowd Admits Inadvertently Lifting Line From TPM’s Josh Marshall at The Huffington Post

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“Coming Correct” in Self-Promotion and Other Tidbits from E! Online’s Leslie Gornstein

March 16th, 2009 by AV Flox in integrity, interview, personal brand

While Celebrity gossip blogs have existed for a while and Hulu, which brings film and television to computers everywhere, won best of show for film and TV at the South by Southwest: Interactive awards this year, in general, the merging of Hollywood and the web has been slow and clumsy.

Enter Leslie Gornstein, the Answer Bitch for E! Online. After working at a start-up that failed and spending some years freelancing, Gornstein got a column online when an editor at E! approached her in 2004.

“He was looking for a sassier, angrier ‘Ask Marilyn’ character,” Gornstein explained over coffee at Caffe Luxxe in Brentwood, where she met with me, Laurie Percival, editor-in-chief of Lalawag and Macala Wright, director of marketing and PR for 1928 Jewelry.

“He said, ‘I’m looking for someone to be the answer bitch, you can be the answer bitch,’” Gornstein recalled. “I said ‘all right.’”

Thus, the entertainment question and answer column ‘Ask The Answer Bitch’ was born. Gornstein never looked back. After living and breathing the celebrity lifestyle for four years, writing a book was natural progression. Her book The A-List Playbook, was released by Skyhorse Publishing last month.

“Despite what’s going on in technology right now and despite the ways that you can push yourself out there to a lot of people, people still see a book as a calling card,” Gornstein said. “I learned some really fascinating basic facts about Hollywood. But there was no compendium of it anywhere—the fact that celebrities have three nannies per child, the fact the average celebrity spends an hour a day with their child, and maybe three to four during a vacation period, the fact that most celebrities get 20,000 dollars a month of free stuff—and the fact that’s how you can gauge if they’re A-list or not. I wanted to put it in a survival guide format because I thought that was the most fun way to read it. But really it’s a window for the rest of us about how those people really live.”

“Are you using social media to promote your book?” Lalawag’s Laurie Percival asked.

“Everything that has an internet connection is now my bitch when it comes to promoting my book,” Gornstein responded, laughing. “Facebook, MySpace—not so much, there is something really disco about that. It looks like a Lebanese disco whenever I go on there! I can’t deal with that. So Facebook, Twitter, E! Online—even World of Warcraft. If it has a line out to the world, it’s my bitch.”

Gornstein, who started tweeting as @answerbitch only last November has almost 2,000 followers. She follows almost everyone back.

Macala Wright can’t get over the information saturation that comes with following that many people on Twitter. She confessed she’d pulled a Loic just a few weeks ago to make her stream more manageable and reflected on how annoyed some people got when they were unfollowed.

“Someone has decided following everyone back is Tweetiquette and you know what? I think people are taking things way too personal,” Gornstein replied. “Because, what does that mean when I don’t return someone’s phone call? Sometimes I’m just not going to return a phone call.”

“I think about this all the time, too,” Laurie Percival pitched in. “Do I have to reply to every @message? How do people do this all day long? There’s no way!”

She described with awe the people who sent personalized direct messages (DMs) after she followed them.

“I just don’t know how they have time,” she said. “So I just don’t do it.”

“You could send out auto-DMs.” Gornstein suggested.

We looked at her with horror. I think one of us even gasped.

“The only reason I think an auto-DM would be offensive, and I got one of these recently, ‘thank you for following, be sure to link my blog’—that’s not cool,” Gornstein defended her position. “When people follow me I send out an auto-message that says, ‘Welcome to the all American festival that is me!’ I don’t see that as a particularly obnoxious thing to do.”

Gornstein seems to have an inherent understanding of how to work new media and leverage the power of real-time user feedback.

“I’m really careful to do it,” she said about self-promotion. “You have to come correct about it, as the drug dealers say. You come to people correct and you say ‘yes, I’m pimping now,’ or I’ll make it participatory and say, ‘correct me if I’m wrong…’ and people like that. It’s conversation. I think that’s respectful.”

She limits the bulk of her self-promotion to Sundays and constantly invites input from her followers and readers. To a large extent, the web has allowed her following to grow and thrive.

“On the internet we have the concept of microcelebrity—being famous for fifteen people, as Momus said in the early 90s,” I told her. “Do you think of yourself as one?”

“I’m definitely famous for fifteen people,” she responded. “My husband loves me!”

“Do you think microcelebrities could apply some of the knowledge found in your book?”

“No,” she said, laughing. “You really need to be visible planet-wide to be able to sling this kind of power around.”

“So you don’t think Julia Allison could get through airport security without having to remove her stilettos?”

“No,” she replied. “Microcelebrities are most famous to themselves. Without the internet, would these people be famous?”

Sounds like a challenge to me. Hear that, NonSociety?

Gornstein pointed to a copy of her book on the coffee table, buried under iPhones, packs of cigarettes and idle Flip cams.

“These people are all cross-media megastars,” she said. “If the internet did not exist, Julia Allison would be a nice intern somewhere, working her microminis and then maybe one day meet Tina Brown and have something nice happen to her for a year. She’s extremely bright and when you read what she writes you see it’s well thought-out, but to be really famous your face needs to be recognizable, your name needs to be recognizable—by more than a small subset of people. If you said, ‘I saw Julia Allison yesterday!’ most people wouldn’t know what you were talking about. But if you said, ‘I saw Julia Roberts yesterday!’ they’d know what you were talking about.”

She’s right. Even so, the section about how Paris Hilton plays the press (“The Paris Hilton Method,” page 65) could be of some use to aspiring fameballers—I’ll trade Laurie’s home phone for Owen Thomas’!

Seriously, though, the way fame is spreading on the web, and with microcelebrity having such a wide and bizarre array of wonders and dangers (from the power you can exert dating the founders of your choice start-up to death by commenter execution) I think there’s a definite sequel there.

Of Possible Interest:
Leslie Gornstein will be signing books and holding a live chat in Los Angeles on Thursday, March 19, 2009, at 7:00PM at the Barnes and Noble at the Grove on 189 Grove Ave. Los Angeles, CA 90036. Call (323) 525-0270.

Full disclosure—Leslie gave me a copy of her book. Yes, I’ve read it, but I’m not gonna tell you just how juicy it is. I’ll leave it by saying that two friends have already attempted to steal it.

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The Balance between Money and Credibility

December 16th, 2008 by AV Flox in blogging, blogging vs journalism, integrity

“I love YOU, but I really hate your URL shortener. It makes me feel dirty—and not in a good way.”

The comment came via Twitter direct message from Adele McAlear in reference to Adjix, the URL shortener I use to fit long URLs into Twitter’s notoriously concise 140 character-long messages.

Adjix is an ad network that pays you to shorten links, which is essentially “a cross between Tinyurl and Google Adwords.” When a reader clicks on an Adjix-shortened link, they are redirected to the URL you input, with an Adjix-generated ad at the top of the page (example).

People who use this shortener earn $0.10 per 1,000 unique link views and $0.20 for each click-through on an ad displayed with their link.

Since I started using Adjix in August of this year, I’ve posted 90 links and made $0.70. It’s been a fun experiment for me, both in terms of tracking click-throughs, which the service does for you, and in terms of learning how to generate some extra cash on Twitter. Its main appeal for me is that I don’t have to pimp anything I wouldn’t normally put out there, I’m essentially getting something back for doing what I usually do: sharing interesting things.

What I never considered is how my followers on Twitter felt about this.

A BLOGGER’S GOTTA EAT!

Blogging can be one of the most thankless things to which a person can devote himself. Whether you’re chronicling your adventures or imparting information within your industry, you’re a person who has to eat and pay bills.

As someone who loves what I read on your blog, I feel it’s my moral obligation to support you. If that means taking 2.5 seconds to scan the ads on your blog after reading your post and commenting, I’ll do it. And I’ll click, too, if something catches my eye. It’s how I say “thank you.”

I didn’t think finding creative ways to make money blogging was a revolutionary concept until this weekend when my stream on Twitter exploded with a controversy over a sponsored post by Chris Brogan, the respected social media adviser.

FULL DISCLOSURE

Brogan writes about how businesses and bloggers can forge strong ties by creating valuable content on social networks. He’s basically the go-to guy when it comes to anything relating to new media.

He’s also on the advisory board for IZEA, a company in next-generation marketing. Per the IZEA blog, bloggers that sign on with IZEA do not receive payment, but they do have options in the company.

Working through IZEA for Kmart, Brogan received a $500 gift card to shop ’til he dropped and blog all about it, as well as another $500 gift card to offer readers who participated in a contest at Dad-o-Matic, where this sponsored post appeared.

Writing for IZEA requires disclosure, meaning that bloggers who are pimping a brand for them have to say up front that they got something out of the deal. Brogan’s piece at Dad-o-Matic (titled, “Sponsored Post-Kmart Holiday Shopping Dad Style”) opened with the following statement: “This post is a sponsored post on behalf of Kmart via Izea. The opinions are mine.”

Simple enough, right? Wrong.

LET THEM EAT CHEESECAKE!

“Bloggers should be able to make money and find synchronous opportunities that work for them. What was off-putting is that Chris benefits by writing an overall favorable review and a prominent one at that,” Damien Basile wrote in response to a post by Geoff Livingston, CEO of Livingston Communications, which puts out The Buzz Bin, a blog about marketing, buzz and PR.

Basile has long respected Brogan’s work and position in the industry, but he had beef with how Brogan handled his part for the Kmart campaign and was very vocal about it. I chased him down earlier tonight to get a handle on why he’d become such an active detractor.

“It was never about how much he profits,” Basile told me on Gtalk. “What is up for discussion is the perception that he may be in a position of conflict and that is enough for me to question it.”

Basile doesn’t feel Brogan’s initial disclosure is sufficient. He thinks Brogan’s ties to IZEA should have been mentioned right on that post, in the event readers did not know he was on their blogger advisory board and held options with IZEA.

“Maybe it was a misnomer to call him a journalist,” Basile reflected. “I do recant that later, but my point was bringing up integrity. Integrity is for everyone. Just because we’re in new media doesn’t mean there are new standards. Truth is truth. Everyone deserves to know the full truth.”

I’m with Livingston and Brogan in disagreeing with Basile that a blogger is a journalist. We could learn a thing or two from them, yes. I’m not a reporter any longer, but I have the Society for Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics up on my wall and it’s never too far out of mind when I blog: 1. Seek the truth and report it, 2. Minimize harm, 3. Act independently, 4. Be accountable.

A blogger may employ these tenets, but a blogger is not a journalist. Journalists have fact-checkers, ombudsmen, editors and publishers, those mighty gatekeepers of information. Journalists are expected to be unbiased. Perhaps most importantly, newsrooms and advertising departments are separated.

A blogger, on the other hand, is often a one-man show. I write the content for my blog, I fact-check, I edit, I publish. You know that saying: a writer who edits her own work has a fool for an editor. Quite right.

That’s not to say a blogger has no responsibility. A blogger has a big responsibility to his community: to provide valuable, quality content.

“How do you think Brogan should have done it?” I asked Basile. “Put up front: ‘Chris Brogan is a member of the IZEA advisory board and has options in IZEA’?”

“The word ‘via’ is very vague,” Basile responded. “It just tells me ‘its way of’ and the link to IZEA was to their main site [as opposed to information about Brogan’s association with the company].”

“How should it have been phrased?” I asked again.

Because this isn’t really about Chris Brogan or IZEA, you see, and to zero-in on that would be to make this a witch-hunt and what have witch-hunts ever gotten us? Nothing. No, this is bigger than that. This is the internet doing what it does best: self-correcting. Let’s not tear down, let’s build. Don’t like how someone does something? Tell me how to do it better.

Finally, Basile replied: “‘This post is sponsored by Kmart for IZEA. I am on the board of IZEA and receive equity options for being on it.’”

There is a valuable lesson here and it goes further than well-worded disclosures, debates about what makes one a journalist, or whether money invariably destroys a blogger’s credibility. As I said before, a blogger has a responsibility to his community. Mob mentality or not, I’m ultimately in accord with Basile: it’s about perception. The perception of your readers matters.

It doesn’t matter if your community thinks you did one thing when you really did another. It’s folly to stand by and call them stupid. They might be stupid, but perception is reality.

WHY SHOULD I CARE?

We should care because social media is about community. Brogan addressed several of the issues raised by his post in comments on blogs as well as in his own blog. That goes a long way.

It may not be enough for others who are disillusioned by the fact he is working with IZEA, but it’s responsible and in the end, all you can do is listen, address concerns as you best can and learn from the experience.

I CAN SEE RIGHT THROUGH YOU

Darren Rowse, my one-man resource when it comes to making money blogging had a series a couple of years ago about credibility and blogging. His series closed with transparency:

I don’t mind bloggers getting something for themselves out of blogging but what does bother me is when I see bloggers attempting to pull the wool over the eyes of their readers by not being honest about their true motivations. Credibility comes when people trust that what you are saying is truth and when there is a lack of truth the consequences for a blogger can be significant.

Transparency also comes into play when you make a mistake or need to apologize for something you’ve done or written. The way bloggers admit to mistakes and rectify them says a lot about their character.

In taking on Adjix, I was experimenting. But I never disclosed the details of my experiment. In fact, very little on my blog speaks about what I’m doing here and why. This needs immediate rectification, which I vow to undertake.

For now, the short of it is: I make some money via another experiment, this one with Google Adwords, but outside of that, no one pays me for any content, including the features. However, my blog does serve me indirectly in that through it I have landed gigs contributing to other web publications and ghost-blogging.

HOW MUCH IS INTEGRITY WORTH?

I found myself asking this question earlier this evening as I chatted with Adele McAlear, head of McAlear Marketing, who’d first objected to my use of Adjix.

“My real problem is not that I have to look at a banner or text ad, or that you’re making money from it,” McAlear told me over Gtalk. “It’s that the URL doesn’t show the true URL of the page you’ve sent me to and this makes linking a pain. It makes me not want to link to you at all, or re-tweet, etc.”

This was a definite downside to the use of Adjix, as retweets are the currency of Twitter. I explained to McAlear that in the Adjix banners, there’s an arrow on the far right that you can click to reveal the true URL.

“I didn’t know that about the arrow,” McAlear told me. “I don’t click on anything that looks like an ad because I never know what I’ll get and where I’m going to be taken.”

Coming from a web-savvy woman, that said a lot. How many other readers didn’t know how to get rid of the banner? Was I short-changing myself for the promise of a quick dime?

“Aside from linking, there’s perception,” McAlear went on. “I think you are a great writer, you have a great handle on social media, marketing, and how all of this works but, yet, this type of URL shortener reminds me of spam. To me, it kind of cheapens your personal brand.”

There it was. She’d said the key word: perception.

“It comes down to balance,” she said. “What your readers and followers on Twitter expect versus what Adjix gives you. I have no issues with anyone making money but there are different ways to do it.”

Integrity versus $0.70. Sure, I could make more if I devoted myself to better employing Adjix. But is it worth it?

Do you make money blogging? Is a disclosure enough to keep yourself from losing credibility? Have you ever unsubscribed from someone’s blogs because they wrote a sponsored post? Your opinion matters whether you’re a webcock or just a reader. We’re all the web. Tell me how you really feel.

UPDATE

December 16, 2007, 5:28PM: In an excellent display of what tuning in to user perspective is all about, Joe Moreno, President of Adjix contacted Adele McAlear after reading this post to let her know that based on her feedback, Adjix has changed the arrow on banners to a simple hyperlink that says, “Remove ad.”

Kudos, Adjix. This is what the web is all about.

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  • AV Flox writes about web culture; new media’s gradual overthrow of old media; trends in social media; and the complicated entanglements people get themselves into as we venture forth into this new world where, more and more, the analog is colliding with the digital.

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