Ghost Blogging

The subject of "Ghost Blogging" just won't go away and I'm debating whether this is a battle worth fighting.

There are many companies out there that want a blog, but just don't want to commit the time and resources to doing it, so instead of saying "this isn't for us," they want to bring in a ghost blogger in order to do the job for the CEO or some other overworked executive who received the mandate "get us a blog!"

The pro argument goes something like this: CEOs don't write their speeches, they don't write their op-ed pieces, they don't write the bylined articles in their name, why should blogging be any different? Over on the side of the communications companies that want to provide this service is the argument that in most cases they're already doing the research and writing the bylined articles, what's it to write a few blog posts too? Oh, and there's money to be made.

Those against have a basic argument: blogs are about transparency and having insight into a corporate executive. It's impossible for someone else to get into that voice and BE that person.

Christopher Barger, director of GM Global Communications Technology made an interesting point in an interview I listened to recently: people accept that op-eds and speeches aren't written by the person listed on the byline, but that hasn't worked, so as communicators we need to do something different.

It's a fair point. Though, I feel like most people DO think that the person whose name is on the op-ed actually wrote it, or at least had a lot to do with its creation (and yes, I've written a few of those). Frankly, it's the communicators who accept the falsehoods as truth.

So if you take Barger's argument to its conclusion, then by ghost blogging, are we just going to kill another avenue to the customer? Will people learn to distrust blogs as well? Or, are people already distrustful of anything coming out of a corporate entity, so then does it really matter?

And is the next step "ghost tweeting?"