Blogging as a business phenomenon began about five years ago. After being endorsed by large companies such as GM and Microsoft, it is now mostly used by smaller companies or individuals who wish to communicate directly with their customers, in order to establish the brand image they want and to boost their name recognition. 20 percent of American businesses now have some kind of blog, with 1 out of 4 outsourcing the writing, and thus allowing for a new category of writers to emerge, the so called “ghost-bloggers”, these ranging from marketing and PR professionals, to laid-off journalists and college students. These individuals are hired to write blog posts or write on Tweeter or Facebook, as if they were the client who hired them, with the objective being as simple as explaining corporate policy to as specific as showing an executive’s personal side.
As a very new young industry, there are no established best practices or trade organizations. Blogging however has in general become so popular that the Federal Trade Commission expanded the rules of product advertisements to include blogs, thereby making it compulsory to reveal any financial connections between the endorser (blogger) and the product company.
The rates that ghost bloggers charge vary, from $18 per blog to $100 per blog, with the best ones also making sure they include specific keywords in their postings that that the company or individual they are writing for comes up higher in search engine rankings. In any case, this type of marketing works out to be much cheaper than the traditional PR route and according to some, more effective as well. There are now specific companies in existence that help one find a ghost-blogger, such as elance.com or online-writing-jobs.com, which have declare a 66% increase in listings over the first 9 months of 2009, and a jump in demand for the category from 74th most popular to the 25th. It is however notable that the listings are under categories such as “writing & translation” and do not clearly state the terms “ghost bloggers”.
Does that make ghost-blogging unethical? Some argue that this is indeed the case, as what is represented as written by the voice of the CEO of a company or any specific individual is not in fact written by that person, and that is essentially a form of lying to the public. The counter-argument is that ghost-blogging is essentially outsourcing an employee to work under the name of the company, and there is nothing unethical about that. We all know and accept that politicians for instance do not write their own speeches, yet there is not even the remote hint that this is unethical. Why should ghost-blogging be any different?
1 comment:
Hey sofiagraf -- Nice post. I'm curious about the numbers you posted. Do you have sources for them?
Re: the ethics of ghost-blogging, my opinion would be that it's ethical, but not very authentic or genuine. I have come to expect it, in the same way that I expect emails "from the CEO" often come from a communications/PR staff, and in the same way that I doubt most celebrities author much of the content in books that they publish. It doesn't strike me as unethical, but it often seems bland and unauthentic in a way that might hurt a brand that relies on those values.
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