Courtesy of Life 123 Alpha
After beginning a discussion on authenticity in the previous post, I decided to delve deeper into the subject. A major issue in regards to authentic social media is ghostwriting.
A study published in the Public Relations Journal found that readers prefer to read a corporate blog written by the CEO or another executive with equal star appeal in the organization. Most readers prefer a CEO blog that covers personal as well as business-related topics.
However, CEO blogs can pose problems for the CEO as well as the organization. For instance, blogging takes time, research, and effort. Can a CEO or another top exec cram another task onto his or her plate? If blogs are too personal, they may become inappropriate or boring. Blogging CEOs must have the communication skills necessary to interact online with organizational publics. Finally, CEOs who blog about the internal logistics of the company may become too transparent and (as discussed in previous posts) may disclose too much information, resulting in legal issues.
Therefore, ghostwriting has entered the blogosphere just as CEOs and organizations have. Simply defined, a “ghostwriter” writes a corporate blog and acts as if he or she is the CEO or top executive who is the supposed author.
Dave Fleet, a marketing and communications consultant from Ontario, believes ghostwriting is unethical. Whether the writer acts as another individual on a blog or a microblog, such as Twitter, he believes readers have a right to know whose personal ideas and words they are reading. If the actual author or the blog is not a CEO, but rather a communications department employee for example, that knowledge should be shared with readers, says Fleet. Without this vital information, readers won’t know who they’re interacting with and his or her trust in the organization may be compromised.
However, a reader of Fleet’s blog on social media and marketing communication begs to differ. “Ghost Blogger,” a reader of Davefleet.com, spends so much time studying how the CEO whom [he] writes for reacts to situations, reading the CEO’s emails, and editing blog post drafts with the CEO face-to-face that [he] believes [his] ghostwriting duties are completely ethical.
The issue still remains undecided. But will ghostwriting become more or less ethical as more people and organizations adapt to blogging and microblogging in the near future?
1 comment
Comments feed for this article
March 18, 2009 at 10:49 pm
Heather Thoreson
Lindsay, I hope ghostwriting in the future does not become viewed as ethical. I feel like it doesn’t matter if someone studies how a CEO would write and answer questions. It still isn’t the CEO. Readers should know who is blogging because if it isn’t the CEO then they are being mislead.
The video we viewed for class, the one with Paul Levy, CEO Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital and Terry “tMac” McKenzie, of Sun Microsystems, talked about how they, as CEO’s of their company, should be the ones blogging. Paul Levy states specifically that he does not use a ghostwriter and he will never use a ghostwriter because his responses have to be in his voice. It has to have his personality written into his words because if it isn’t then people will see through that.
Here is the link back to the video if you want to watch it again: