“Shadow Blogging” is it Ethical in Reputation Management?

I call the act of a company that hires a person or a company to blog on their behalf “Shadow Blogging”. A part of reputation management is damage control for sure, answering posts in a positive way or even posting to educate people about a new service. Where do we draw the line in ethics? That is a question that will need to be answered. 

There has always been a controversy about the separation of content and advertising, yet in online advertising “advertorials” are very acceptable. Pay Per Post, which was a great way of building reputation, recently required their affiliate bloggers to adhere to a disclosure policy. And then there was the WalMart blog scandal.The question of ethics really comes in when you are posting positive comments about a company’s service in forums and blogs. With reputation management you look for positive comments, negative comments and no comments and then post accordingly.

But, if you believe that the service provided by your customer is great, and then is it really unethical to let people know about it and get paid to do so?

I would love to hear from other people that deal in Social Media? Comment away! 

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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 25th, 2007 at 9:22 pm and is filed under Blogging, Social Media Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.