Talking About Disclosure Round Table Recap


SMC Talking About DisclosureWow! What a great conversation tonight over at CNet’s Headquarters here in San Francisco - thanks again to Joel Sacks and Rafe Needleman for hosting us there. Unfortunately my M-Audio died again in a new and interesting way - thankfully Martin Mckeay had his trusty iRiver and we will be posting audio of the nearly two hour conversation soon. You can subscribe to the Social Media Club podcast via iTunes by searching for Social Media Club in their podcast directory.

As for the meat of the matter, it was quickly clear that the issue of disclosure is one that impacts everyone and everyone understands its importance in the broader context. When one person makes a bad decision, everyone is impacted so it is an issue that everyone wants to work on together. The mix of people was pretty good with 19 people showing up including Rafe Needleman, Mike Arrington, Tantek Celik, Joel Sacks, Greg Narain, Brian Solis, Sean Savage, Shannon Clark, Vic Podcaster, Sanford Barr, Jeremy, Daniel Riveong, Pete Kazanjy, Glenda Bautista, Matt Levine, James Yu with nearly everyone contributing some great points. (too many links to research and create this late tonight - my apologies everyone)
There were a few key points that emerged from my perspective:

  • I started off the conversation talking about this era needing to embrace the 3 T’s (as opposed to the old focus on the 3 C’s) which are Transparency, Truth and Trust
  • There are a lot of grey areas so absolute rules are hard to come by here, we should strive for greater understanding of best practices (which is the purpose of Social Media Club)
  • Disclosure is somewhat situational in nature and will vary by geography and culture
  • The biggest issue is seemingly one of media literacy amongst media consumers as much as it is an issue for those producing media
  • Everyone is biased in some way, journalists are not immune as we are all human - bloggers need more appreciation of how they can be influenced
  • We all get free drinks from time to time (including everyone who attended tonight) but that usually is not enough to be bought
  • We need to find a great and easy to understand metaphor/story about what is ok and what is not ok
  • We have more to figure out and map than one discussion could allow

Kristie Wells took some good notes of what people had to say which are available in a MindJet MindMap format as well as a PDF and also took some good photos. Personally, I am really looking forward to listening to the audio and dissecting some of the finer points of the discussion. Perhaps someone out there will take the MindMap and re-organize it according to topics rather than speakers and that will really move it forward. (you can download a free trial from MindJet or get their free MindMap viewer if you want to play with it - yes MindJet has sponsored our events in the past, but I bought the software before we had a relationship because I loved it so much)

At the end of the conversation, Mike Arrington made a proposal that:

We begin a dialogue and process that we all agree to adhere to the outcome of in regards to what is the proper, ethical way to handle disclosure - even if it is not the one I want, I will agree to abide by the group’s decision. We also need to have a meethod of resolution for challenges to ethics where the process can begin in private first so that people can not use such challenges to create controvery and generate increased page views and notoriety through baseless accusations. (paraphrased, not quoted)

So we have opened up the Social Media Club Wiki (password is ‘media’ without the quotes) to start working on a real Social Media Code of Ethics which will be adopted as the standard for the club and all members to endorse. Rafe Needleman suggested we keep our initial efforts focused, perhaps just on Technology Bloggers so we can avoid some of those muddier grey areas and I think he is probably right about that.

The entire effort is adopting the tag “blogger+ethics” (tip of the hat to Greg Narain on the added value the plus sign has here). We would like to start by tagging all relevant codes of ethics thusly and also all opinions on these matters to be collected in Blog posts tagged similarly to help us start focusing. Also, start making use of the Wiki to begin our work on this important effort.

There is a lot more to discuss here and we came up with some more interesting ideas for the Disclosr service that Social Media Club is beginning to develop. As I suspected in my post last night, this is only the beginning of a very important and high impact conversation.

Thanks to everyone for coming out. I am looking forward to continuing this conversation in DC next Monday and Boston next Thursday at the Round Tables we are holding there. I imagine it will be a part of the conversation in New York tonight as well.

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October 25th, 2006
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Comment Number:
1
Written by:
Kevin Murphy
Posted on:
October 25, 2006 at 11:14 pm

Disclosure.

The page I’m looking at:

http://www.socialmediaclub.org/2006/10/25/talking-about-disclosure-round-table-recap/

What I’m thinking:

“Who wrote this?”

Seriously. Who are you?

I’m a reporter. I’ve never read your blog before. I don’t know who you are.

A byline would seem to be the absolute minimum amount of disclosure required before publishing an article of this type. Where’s yours?

Comment Number:
2
Written by:
Web Strategy by Jeremiah » Disclosure on the Blogosphere
Posted on:
October 26, 2006 at 12:16 am

[…] Chris Heuer lead a roundtable last night focused down on the topic. We had some brief conversations about this at the Social Media Club on Monday, and it’s great to see such a focused conversation on it. Michael Arrington encourages folks to talk about this as it’s an issue that could unravel the trust and intention of the free web, those damn humans.  You can check out Chris’s recap of the event. If someone promotes a product or company, and is on their payroll, disclosure is required, period. […]

Comment Number:
3
Written by:
Network Security Blog
Posted on:
October 26, 2006 at 3:15 am

Blogger Ethics…

…

Comment Number:
4
Written by:
francine hardaway
Posted on:
October 26, 2006 at 4:26 am

I have been blogging since the beginning of Blogger, and before that I had a weekly email list, Stealthmode, on Yahoo Groups. This was the outgrowth of owning a PR firm for fifteen years, and after that working for Intel.

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.
(crossposted to Tech Crunch)

Comment Number:
5
Written by:
Howard
Posted on:
October 26, 2006 at 5:09 am

Better Bad News does a hysterical look at disclosure, PayPerPost, and the latest Gillmor Gang at http://www.betterbadnews.com/69

– Howard

Comment Number:
6
Written by:
Howard
Posted on:
October 26, 2006 at 5:17 am

Kevin:
The byline appears on the ‘main page’ of the site, but doesn’t appear to be in the ‘full post’ template. We’ll reconfigure the blog to have it. Thanks for pointing it out. - Howard Greenstein, Social Media Club Co-Founder.

Comment Number:
7
Written by:
Chris Heuer
Posted on:
October 26, 2006 at 5:45 am
Kevin - you are right - I thought it used to be on the page but apparently was not.  I have fixed that now on the template - looks like an error in all the Squibble themes out there. I wrote it and my name is Chris Heuer
Comment Number:
8
Written by:
Sean Savage
Posted on:
October 26, 2006 at 9:39 am

Thanks for organizing Social Media Club and the great disclosure discussion last night.

We seemed to agree that, as publishers, it’s a good practice to state our biases and be aware of them too. In that spirit, it’s helpful for the group that gathered last night to be aware of its biases.

There were plenty of bloggers and technologists and businessfolk present. There were folks who understand how to create algorithms and tools that might -augment- the social processes of reputation creation and management. All these voices are important. But the biases of such a crowd can lead us towards tackling social problems with overly technological solutions, and towards technological determinism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_determinism).

How can we counteract this tendency and maximize our effectiveness in reaching the group’s goals? Simply keeping this bias and tendency in mind will help a lot.

I think it will be really helpful to bring in someone with a background and biases that lead -away- from technological determinism. Someone, for instance, with a deep understanding of how people judge and communicate reputation. We’re off to a great start, and perhaps a participant from the realm of anthropology/sociology can help us avoid excessive focus and reliance on -tool-building- as an approach what really is a -social- matter.

I’ll try to bring in a friend or two from that realm. If you agree that this is important, and if you know anyone in the world of social sciences/media studies, please invite them to participate here.

Comment Number:
9
Written by:
Webomatica
Posted on:
October 26, 2006 at 10:05 am

Just two thoughts based on the PDF: I like the idea of a tool that could help automate disclosure. It could be as simple as a tag that indicates a previously defined relationship, and then a paragraph of text appears.

Second I like the idea of a disclosure page. All the info in one place. It would be helpful to have a template to follow however.

I also notice different opinons about what non-financial relationships ought to be disclosed. Obviously if you work for a company or on their payroll, or own stock disclosure is good, but what if your wife’s friend works at a company and you blog about it? This could easily be misconstrued by a reader as back-scratching even if there is no payment or free iPods. This may fall under the realm of the difficulty in listing all the relationships. But if there were a list of suggested relationships that would help a lot.

Comment Number:
10
Written by:
More on Flogs, Edelman, and Disclosure » Webomatica
Posted on:
October 26, 2006 at 10:19 am

[…] Note: Here’s the recap of the Social Media Club Disclosure discussion. […]

Comment Number:
11
Written by:
Deep Jive Interests » Is Toronto the Blogging Wasteland of North America?
Posted on:
October 26, 2006 at 12:08 pm

[…]   The Social Media Club’s RoundTable on Blogging Ethics last night.  Held in the CNet offices in San Francisco.  Sounds like it was a great time where Mike Arrington dropped by and a great discussion was had about the ethics and the responsibilities of the bloggers, PR folks and more in social media. […]

Comment Number:
12
Written by:
Chris Heuer
Posted on:
October 26, 2006 at 12:36 pm
Sean - great point - that is one of the key goals of what we are doing - to make sure the right voices are being heard from the many different perspectives that have value. I don’t know anyone from that realm per se so it would be great if you were able to get your friends contributions.

Webeomatics - that is exactly along the lines of what I am hoping to do with Disclosr here - the plans are basically sketched out, now we need to get the service developed so I am working on finding the right programmer to build it. If you know of someone, please let me know

Comment Number:
13
Written by:
Deep Jive Interests » Ethics With Teeth: How Should We Deal With Floggers, SockPuppetry, and Goggers?
Posted on:
October 26, 2006 at 6:16 pm

[…] There’s been a meme floating around that seems to be catching steam — the idea of accountability in the sense of trust that bloggers have with their peers and their audience.  Yes, this is another branch of the Edelman fiasco.   The importance of disclosure and transparency. Pledges, badges, commitees, codes of ethics and round tables have all been … uh, tabled. […]

Comment Number:
14
Written by:
Social Media Club » Consequences for abusing the public trust?
Posted on:
October 27, 2006 at 12:24 pm

[…] For me the biggest challenge I see in our efforts for dealing with the ethics of disclosure coming out of our Social Media Club Round Table on Wednesday was the matter of consequences for those individuals and organizations who betray our trust so egregiously. Edelman and Wal-Mart both abused the public’s trust in the Web’s ability to be a source for honesty with the Walmarting Across America episode, and we all suffered as a result (we being Bloggers and producers of media - journalists and communications pros alike). I was speaking with Cathy Brooks last night at the VOX Launch Party about this, and she felt that there are indeed consequences in the system of law that governs us that may offer a recourse - but I truly dislike the litigation culture we live in and don’t see that as being the fair route. She had many other important things to say on this, and I for one, am sorry she was not able to make it to our discussion. […]

Comment Number:
15
Written by:
Disclosure Cafe at Web 2point2: Agency Responsibility at Emergence Media
Posted on:
November 7, 2006 at 11:58 pm

[…] Following-up on the Social Media Club round-table discussions on Blog Disclosure (EM’s roundup here), Chris Heuer has encouraged me to participate in a the “Disclosure Cafe” discussions at the Web 2point2 Unconference in San Francisco (November 9-10). […]

Comment Number:
16
Written by:
Cathy Brooks
Posted on:
November 14, 2006 at 9:16 am

I thought I heard my name being taken in vain. (-: Seriously, wanted to chime in on this - albeit a couple of weeks tardy. I don’t know about you, but my parents raised me to believe that when you behave poorly there are consequences … And part of living in a society (which is defined by at least one dictionary as an “aggregate of people living in a more or less ordered community”) is behaving according to the guidelines of that group. And it is incumbent upon the people who are in that group to ensure that they are, for lack of a better word, policing their own community.

Comment Number:
17
Written by:
Social Media Club » Interviews with Chris Heuer, Co-Founder of Social Media Club
Posted on:
January 4, 2007 at 3:55 pm

[…] (2) Chris sat down ‘virtually’ with Brian Oberkirch and chatted about Social Media Club, disclosure/blogger ethics and the Social Media Press Release. It is a long one, but a good one which can be heard here. Are you interested in doing an interview with one of the SMC Co-Founders? Please contact Kristie Wells at kristie [at] brainjams [dot] org for details and scheduling and I will hook you up. Tags […]