news…

There’s no excuse for what happened in the Edelman/WalMart affair.In my own firm, and in my blog, I always disclose and always tell the truth, because I feel as though I am writing to a group of friends. Sometimes those friends disagree with me, but most of the time they are polite about it, or they announce that they are leaving me.It would have been easy to create the WalMart blog and then post somewhere else that it was an experiment in creating a semi-fictional SecondLife type experience. That’s fun and valid, if harder to explain to WalMart the Client.

I believe that one’s own reputation is the most important thing you have. It’s a lot easier to disclose (yes, this is a client or a sponsor) and make your points than to hold back and risk being exposed.

The fact is we all have some conflicts of interest, even if they don’t involve money: things done by friends of ours, things that will help our lives, etc. and they are inevitable. Also, from working at Intel I learned that in a public company there are disclosure and non-disclosure rules that are dictated by outside entities.

It wouldn’t matter WHAT we wanted to dislose at Intel –the SEC has its own ideas about what’s necessary, and sometimes they conflict with the human impulse to tell the whole truth.

One last point: language has a lot to do with things regarding disclosure. There are words, and there are substitute words that seem to be synonyms but are just a little different. My mother used to teach me to tell the truth, while telling me that if I couldn’t say something nice I shouldn’t say anything. This greases the social contract, but it doesn’t take care of the problem of disclosure. Tact, or choosing one’s words carefully, might take care of it more. One of the problems with blogging is that it’s usually on the fly and immediate, and often unedited. That, in itself, creates problems.

That’s why this is such a difficult issue, and I hope we don’t end up with a bunch of disclosure rules like the SEC In the absence of such rules, I will continue to keep telling the truth and trying not to hurt anybody along the way.

Thanks
Tony @ DJI

Tonight we’re hosting a roundtable entitled, “Talking About Disclosure” to discuss honesty, ethics, and disclosure - the things that will serve as a solid foundation for blogs as well as helping to escalate credibility in the blogosphere, among cons…

If a blog is bad or filled with obvious marketing and no relevance, it won’t reach critical mass plain and simple. To impose rules and regulations is to take a step back and remove power from the bloggers and the viewers themselves.

I’m SO sorry that I have to miss tonight’s event. I was quite looking forward to hearing what folks have to say and contributing myself. I will try to watch online … When you get a second, drop me an email as I’d love to catch up with you …