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.

But I have found that connecting doesn’t lead to forming a meaningful relationship. Connecting is easy: it requires a couple of clicks. Forging a relationship takes time and energy.

“Within Internet Marketing, I have developed some solid relationships with and would work with them, partner with them, and/or hang out with them at the drop of a dime,” Tony Adam writes in his post, Keys to building quality relationships and things to avoid. “The problem here is that there are people that don’t understand there is big difference between someone that is a contact vs. someone that you have established a relationship with and the value of that relationship.”

The investment into 450 people in terms of time and energy is a big one, and one that I can’t meet. It’s made me into what my best friend Atherton Bartelby calls “a bad Facebook friend”: one who doesn’t comment on your updates or posts or regularly look over your photos.

It reminds me of that piece in the New York Times Magazine Brave New World of Digital Intimacy by Clive Thompson, that came out in the fall of last year:

In 1998, the anthropologist Robin Dunbar argued that each human has a hard-wired upper limit on the number of people he or she can personally know at one time. Dunbar noticed that humans and apes both develop social bonds by engaging in some sort of grooming; apes do it by picking at and smoothing one another’s fur, and humans do it with conversation. He theorized that ape and human brains could manage only a finite number of grooming relationships: unless we spend enough time doing social grooming — chitchatting, trading gossip or, for apes, picking lice — we won’t really feel that we “know” someone well enough to call him a friend.

Dunbar noticed that ape groups tended to top out at 55 members. Since human brains were proportionally bigger, Dunbar figured that our maximum number of social connections would be similarly larger: about 150 on average. Sure enough, psychological studies have confirmed that human groupings naturally tail off at around 150 people: the “Dunbar number,” as it is known. Are people who use Facebook and Twitter increasing their Dunbar number, because they can so easily keep track of so many more people?

Thompson’s conclusion, after speaking with many “aggressively social people” was that the Dunbar number was not being increased. Online interaction has the ability to enrich relationships by keeping people connected, but deep relationships require more. The main change, Thompson noted, seemed to be among people’s “weak ties,” that is, their acquaintances or contacts.

Contacts are not a bad thing. I don’t think, for example, that a solution to my being a bad Facebook friend is to prune my list. I don’t want to shut people out. I just want to interact in a more meaningful way.

I just don’t know there’s enough time in the day to do it.

I KNOW YOU PARASOCIALLY

When I met Brian Solis at the TechZulu anniversary party last week, I told him I was fond of his musings on the web and social media. He asked me whether we knew one another and I told him, “I know you parasocially.”

He laughed. And it is funny—it’s funny to recognize it and call it like it is. I might know where he had dinner and what he’s reading because of Twitter, but I don’t know him at all and I recognize this.

That’s a parasocial relationship: a one-sided consumption of information where one of the parties knows a lot about the other, but the other party is completely oblivious about the former’s existence. This used to be more common among celebrities and their fans, but in an era of oversharing, many non-celebrities are gathering audiences that know a great deal about us. They feel close with us because of how much is shared by us on the daily, whether via our blogs, or microblogging platforms like Twitter, or through our photos on Flickr and videos on YouTube and Vimeo. Maybe we’re even Facebook “friends.”

But it doesn’t mean anything because there’s no real relationship.

QUALITY CONTACTS

“The real value is in the quality of the relationship and not the quantity of contacts,” says Adam—and he’s right.

In A list of 10 social media habits that I am stopping immediately, John Welsh announces that he will no longer ignore people he adds on Facebook after accepting their request.

“As soon as I accept a ‘friend request, I write a comment on their wall,” Welsh writes. “Why did I imagine that accepting a ‘friend request’, and not saying hello, was anything but rude?”

He’s right, but that’s not all there is to it. A relationship is more than a DM or an e-mail or @replies or comments on your photos or a funny back and forth on Facebook walls. Hell, a relationship is more than sporadic IM conversations, e-mails and even phone calls. A relationship is a social commitment.

“Relationships, whether they’re on Twitter, Facebook, or any other social network, are held to the same guiding and ethical principles of those we cherish in the real world,” says Brian Solis in his piece Finding the Tweet Spot – Top Tips for Building Twitter Relationships. “Think of them as investments where the ROI is intelligence, social capital, respect, trust, and friendship. Individuals on both sides must realize mutual benefits and advantages for cultivating short-term or long-term relationships. You are equally responsible for contributing ongoing value.”

The piece by Solis is full of ways to maximize one’s connections online. My favorite bit of advice: “Remember, always pay it forward and never forget to pay it back… it’s how you got here and it defines where you’re going.”

SCRATCH MY BACK…
I’LL TOTES SCRATCH YOURS AFTER I’M DONE SCRATCHING THE BACKS OF 449 OTHER PEOPLE!

Ask anyone about what a relationship is and you’ll hear something about giving as much as you take. The biggest issues I have had in interpersonal relationships have come about as a result of one party feeling they’re giving more than they’re getting, so it’s no surprise that this is one of the biggest complaints in social media.

“Big names don’t like coming to events because people are always asking something,” someone explained to me at a recent tech event in Los Angeles.

Everyone talks about the popularity contest in social media, the race for more followers, for higher trends and better grades. What about the flip side? The day you can’t go on IM because your screen explodes with 50 different “friends” asking something? The night of some big event when your phone blows up with texts and calls from “friends” wondering if you can get them in?

Even from the nosebleed section, I can see it’s a hell of lonely place down there, center stage, with all eyes on you. You just can’t do it all. Even if you want to, you just can’t. We’re overextended.

Even I, with only (only?) 450 Facebook friends and 2,350 Twitter followers, am over my head.

I want to make good on my social commitment. I would love to read the blog of every person who reads my blog and retweet every person who has ever retweeted me and answer every e-mail and every phone call. But as the barriers go down, as we interact with more and more people, it becomes harder to do this. I feel, more often than not, that it’s not that people are too important to be bothered, but that we can’t do it all. The web annihilated geographic boundaries, but there are still only so many hours in the day.

How do you strike a balance? How do you remain accessible to all who want to reach out, foster meaningful relationships, and still have enough hours in the day to work and play and rest?