Hi,

Listened to whole thing (do I get a prize?), and had a couple of comments– look forward to seeing you folks Nov 2 in Boston!

RE: blog credibility– what I thought was missing from this part of the talk was the concept of audience responsibility. It is my belief that there is no such thing as absolute objectivity in any medium — and the audience has a responsibility to themselves to be critical consumers and “consider the source.” If you read a blogger long enough, you will know his or her tendencies, opinions, and tendencies enough to know how to interpret praise for or slamming of a company.

RE: Swag, gifts, and giving/lending product: I was left with the impression that in part we are re-learning lessons that were learned ages ago with the “old” media: swag gets old because the journalists see through it, giving–or lending- out products are necessary to get reviewed, and has become SOP in the old media world– why would it be different with bloggers? (There are probably a bunch of reasons why, but let’s not ignore lessons already learned).

RE: Conflict resolution in private: I would think many bloggers would have a real problem with that, as the idea runs counter to the idea of every conversation in social media being out in the open. That’s not completely true now, of course, and I am sure there were a lot of substantive private communications in the Edelman/Wal-Mart case before the belated official statement. I would, however, expect resistance to a formalized structure from some quarters.

[…] 2:00PM Disclosure Cafe: Inspired by our Round Table a few weeks ago called Talking About Disclsoure, we are going to host a “World Cafe” formatted discussion on the topic focused on 3 rounds of questions to be discussed in small groups of 5-6 people each. This is in effect what we did with the Social Media to Corporate Media workshop that was held on October 23, 2006, but more focused on producing a specific outcome. We hope to end this session with a set of guidelines we can publish on what we feel is the right way and wrong way to handle disclosure, the potential solutions (systems and processes) and consequences for abusing the public trust. (Chris Heuer facilitates, everyone leads) […]

[…] finished listening to the marathon (for a podcast) recording of the Social Media Club in San Francisco from last week, discussing blogger ethics. The talk was […]