The answer is no, it doesn’t. Not if it’s done correctly.

I’ve talked about ghost blogging before, and said if it follows a few basic procedures, it’s as ethical as, say, public relations. (Er, on second thought. . . )

Yet, the issue keeps getting brought up, as if we’re committing some unpardonable ethical sin, like medical testing on baby seals. But the only people who seem to care are social media purists and “social media ninjas” who talk about transparency, yet work in industries where their efforts, if done correctly, are anonymous and behind the scenes as well.

Ghostwriting = copywriting

Anyone who does freelance copywriting can tell you that their name doesn’t go on squat when it comes to their efforts. Sales brochures, web copy, sales letters, speeches, you name it, the writer’s name is not-so-noticeably absent from the final copy. And that’s fine. That’s the life we choose.

Marketing agencies don’t get their names on their clients’ campaigns. No one whines that “my name isn’t on that sales brochure I wrote” or “my name isn’t in the newspaper article I sent the press release about.” Frankly, if you’re worried about getting credit for your work, you’re in the wrong business. If you want a byline, be a journalist.

Maintaining Ethical Boundaries for Ghost Blogging

A good ghost has procedures they follow with their clients:

1. I interview the client, who tells me — in his own words — his thoughts about their industry-specific issues.
2. I transcribe the interview and clean it up, turning it into 350 – 450 words of clear, informative copy.
3. The client approves the article.
4. I publish the article on their blog.

It’s the clients thoughts, the client’s words. I just transcribe it. Or as we like to say, “we do the work so you can go to your meetings.”

How is this any different from the CEO’s letter at the front of the company’s annual report? Or a politician’s speech to her constituents? Or the catalog copy that was supposedly written by the company’s founder? How is it any different from a PR flak’s press release that becomes the basis for a news article? (I say this as a former flak whose press releases were often turned into “Staff Wire Reports” by one county newspaper.)

Answer: It isn’t. Not a bit. They are exactly the same thing. (In fact, Jason Falls says that we’re not ghostwriters, we’re copywriters, and that it’s okay.)

These are the same steps that every other copywriter, speechwriter, and marketing director in the world follows when they produce work for a client. This has been an acceptable practice since well before Judson Welliver ghosted for Warren G. Harding, thus becoming the first presidential speechwriter.

The only place ghostwriting isn’t acceptable is journalism and academia, as it should be. Your merit is based on the work you produce; in business, it’s based on the results you achieve. (Although academia seems to have some of its own ghostwriting issues.)

So if you are against ghost blogging, you need to be against all ghostwriting. You need to speak out against speechwriters for politicians. You need to put an end to all freelance copywriting. You need to stop sending out press releases that don’t include your name as a quoted source.

Otherwise, it’s a non-issue. The people who hire me are the ones I’m concerned with. The social media purists? Well, you just give me something to blog about, thus boosting my own search engine rankings.

So, thanks for that.

Then why are you such a jerk online?

I hear a lot of talk about authenticity, and whether someone like Guy Kawasaki should have a ghost Twitterer. (He doesn’t. He has two.) Or whether it’s appropriate to send nothing but broadcast tweets for your online business. (It’s not.) We bandy about the word “authenticity,” defining it as being truthful and honest about disseminating your own thoughts.

Yet, I’m struck by some of the personal inauthenticity I see between online personas and their real-world counterparts.

While most of the people I know match their online and offline personalities very well — most are pleasant, a couple are complete jerks — I’m surprised at the number of people who are all sunshine and merriness when I meet them, but they turn into spiteful, nasty, snarky Mr. and Ms. Hyde when they get in front of their computer.

True authenticity means you need to match your two personalities. If you’re a nice person in the real world, be a nice one in the virtual world. If you want to be a jerk online, be a jerk offline. Don’t hide behind the anonymity of your keyboard and think you’re somehow safe from being found out.

The problem with social media these days is we know who each other is. Our avatars are plastered all over our Twitter and Facebook pages. We link to our blogs, where we talk about our jobs and personal lives. And, at least in this community, we meet each other out in the real world.

Photo: AFSilva

In June 2006, I was working at the Indiana State Department of Health as the Risk Communication Director. Basically, I was in charge of crisis communication, or as I called it, “oh shit” PR.

That’s because whenever some emergency or crisis came up, those were the first two words any of us usually said. We all did, the public affairs staff, the epidemiologists, even the Emergency Response department. Whether it was a Hepatitis A scare at a Pizza Hut in Fort Wayne, salmonella in a Wal-Mart in Johnson County, or a national outbreak of salmonella in peanut butter, we all had the same response when we first heard the news of the latest public health crisis.

I had been working on the job for about three weeks, when I was called down to Legal because “we have a problem.” My first “problem,” in fact. When I showed up, there were eight people sitting around a conference table. They filled me in.

As part of a summer reading program, the Monroe County Library in Bloomington had been giving away bendable children’s toys which were discovered to be dangerously contaminated with lead. The children’s librarian and the lead prevention nurse at Monroe County Hospital had sent samples a couple months earlier to the Consumer Protection Agency, but no one had responded beyond an initial phone call.

Rather than giving up, they then contacted the State Health Department, hoping that someone, anyone, would pay attention to the fact that they had just given out a bunch of lead-contaminated toys, and could we please help them get the word out to their community?

Happily, I didn’t utter my little mantra out loud.

Turns out, another library in another county had also been giving away these toys, which made this a statewide issue. So we decided to send out a press release to all the state media outlets, and see what happened. That afternoon, I answered a few reporters’ questions, and then forgot all about it.

Three days later, I received a call from the director of the New Jersey State Library Association.

It turns out the Muncie Star-Press had run our story, which was then picked up by a librarian blogger. The director read the blog and nearly freaked: they had been giving those toys to a statewide children’s reading program all summer.

Guess what I said, out loud, over the phone.

“You’re telling me,” he said. “What should we do?”

“I don’t know, I’ve been doing this job for three freaking weeks!” I wanted to shout. “This is my first real crisis.”

Instead, I ran through the talking points we had given out to the media, and gave him a few recommendations.

“Could you email that to me?” he asked. “I belong to a listserv group of librarians around the country. I think several of us have been giving out these toys. I can pass it on to them.”

I emailed the talking points and recommendations off to the guy, and then forgot all about it again. Two days later, I received another phone call from the Orange County Register.

The reporter said that several of California’s libraries had been giving away some toys that were found to be contaminated with lead, and since we were the ones who had started this whole thing, did we have any information we could give them?

I explained how the whole thing had started with the nurse and librarian in Monroe County, and how this was apparently being felt in a couple of states now.

“Oh, it’s more than a couple now,” said the Times reporter.

As the days went by, I would go online to see who else had been recalling these children’s toys. Within 24 hours of the OC Register call, the story exploded. Several librarians on the librarian listserv had called their local media with the same story. In a couple cases, someone in one city would read the story and tell their librarian friends in another city, who would then find the listserv information, and call their media outlets.

The tipping point came when the Associated Press sent a national story over the newswire, and local reporters called their local libraries to see if they had those toys. The librarians would go pale and whisper my two words. A quick check always revealed the very same toys for the very same children’s reading program.

A few weeks later, a check of Google News showed something I had never expected: a recall of 385,000 lead-contaminated toys from all 50 states, and more than 530 news stories in the United States, Canada, Germany, England, Italy, India, and Taiwan. And two field agents from the Consumer Protection Agency were suddenly very interested in some bendable toys they had received several months earlier from two women in Bloomington, Indiana.

As I look back on this story, I am struck by one very important lesson: this did not become a national recall just because of traditional media. They had help. What really kicked it off is that a blogger saw an article in her local paper and wrote about it. Then a guy on an email listserv sent it out to the other members. Old-school media played an important part, but it was the new media that really pushed it in the right direction.

All because a librarian blogger was connected to a guy on a librarian listserv. But more importantly, because a nurse and a children’s librarian decided that they needed to speak up about an issue in their hometown, and didn’t quit until someone heard them.

I didn’t get there as often as I wanted, and we didn’t call it a Mobile Work Day, but I did get to spend some time with Doug Karr, Jason Bean, James Paden, and Stephen Coley of Brandswag.

It’s actually an efficient way to work. Many times I learned about new information, heard about new services and best practices, and even got some help fixing a couple problems that had plagued me for months. It was also a way to strengthen friendships and working relationships. I have a few more people I feel comfortable calling for help and/or referring business to.

Since then, I’ve tried to start up Mobile Work Days in other areas of town. I’ve had them at Gourmet Grounds of Geist in Fishers, and Hubbard and Cravens in Broad Ripple. While attendance has been small, the idea has been embraced by the social media pros and entrepreneurs in the area. I think Mobile Work Days may be a new way of doing business and boosting our local economy.

So we’re going to try to make this a real thing, a real way of doing business.

What is a Mobile Work Day?

A Mobile Work Day (#MobileWorkDay) is where entrepreneurs and small businesspeople hang out in a local coffee shop and get some work done with other entrepreneurs and SMBs.

We pick local coffee shops, as opposed to Starbucks, for a number of reasons:

1. Free wifi. None of this paid wifi or AT&T crap. I know some Starbucks now offer free wifi, but that’s because the locals have been doing it for years.
2. The coffee is better. ‘Nuff said.
3. Local shops are more conducive to groups. A lot of the locals have tables you can shove together for groups of 6 or more. At the Bean Cup, we would sometimes take up half their tables and have 16 – 20 people working together in one long row of tables. Unfortunately, they may have had the biggest seating available, so that option may be lost to us.
4. Money you spend at local shops come back to the community. When you spend $1 at a local shop, $.40 stays in the area. When you spend $1 at a Starbucks, only $.13 stays.

There are no rules or expectations for what you work on, how long you stay, or when you show up or leave. Our only request is that you spend some money at the place. Get a cup of coffee and a refill, or a latte and a muffin. Buy some lunch and a water. Just make it worth the coffee shop’s while for having us take up some tables for a few hours.

Ultimately, Mobile Work Days are good for the community. Hosting one at a local coffee shop helps their business, and it boosts our own local economy by supporting local merchants. Besides, if we want local support for our own businesses, we need to support them. If you’re an entrepreneur who has meetings at big chains, don’t be surprised if your local community can’t or won’t support you in return.

Our next Mobile Work Day is Thursday, November 19 at Hubbard & Cravens at 6229 Carrollton Rd., in Broad Ripple. We’ll start at around 8:30 or 9:00, and go until about 4:00 or 5:00.

We’ll start holding these on the 3rd Thursday of every month, and we’ll try to come up with some different places to hold it. If you have any suggestions, let me hear them. Our criteria is free, reliable wifi, the ability to hold a group of at least 10 mobile professionals while still taking good care of their regular crowd.

Quantity or quality? Spiders or readers? Left brain or right brain? Classical or Romantic?

Less filling or tastes great?

Some of the authorities in our blogging community believe quantity is more important. That as bloggers, it’s more important to just throw up as much as you can and see what attracts Google’s attention.

“Don’t worry about the quality,” one Spiders-oriented blogger told me. “Just get up as much as you can, as fast as you can. Spelling and grammar aren’t that important.”

I shuddered involuntarily.

“I don’t worry about search,” said a Readers-oriented blogger. “I don’t pay attention to SEO, keywords, backlinks, or any of that. I just make sure I write good stuff, and the readers will come.”

It works too.

Both are experts in their field, and are widely sought after as speakers and consultants in the social media and blogging realm. But the Readers blog has a much bigger social media footprint. He’s got more Twitter followers (18,000 vs. 1,200), more blog readers, higher Technorati rank (1526th and 598 auth. vs. er, none), more readers (approx. 50,000 vs. 7,000 via Compete.com), but fewer Google hits (84,000 vs. 44,000).

(I emailed my friend the Readers blogger as I was writing this post, and he told me he doesn’t pay attention to numbers at all, and wasn’t that concerned about them.)

The results are rather telling. Quality is winning out over quantity, readers are winning out over spiders.

Tastes great is beating less filling.

The problem is, you can write for spiders and search all day long, but if people don’t like what you have to say, they’re not going to stick around, let alone come back on a regular basis. Just because they showed up once doesn’t guarantee they’ll show up again. That’s where good quality writing comes in.

You could argue that it takes search to bring a person in and then hook them with good writing. But there are so many other ways to bring them around: Twitter, Facebook, speaking opportunities, networking, business cards, etc.

As a writer, I’m also more concerned about readership than, well, spidership. I’m not that concerned about winning search, because I write about a number of esoteric topics. However, I occasionally get lucky. On my Laughing Stalk humor blog, I have seen some pretty weird results.

• I once won search for “animal methane problem” out of 30,000 results, and topped out at 7th for “animal fart gene” out of 17,000 for 9 months or so. Results: 2 – 4 visitors per week during those 9 months.
• I beat the original “Suite Talk with Peyton Manning” website, where you could get customized greetings to you from Peyton (they got 2nd). Results: Big fat zero. Who wants to read about the commercial, when you can see the commercial.
• I’m currently second for “it’s in my raccoon wounds” out of 135,000 results. I held first for a few years, for a post in 2005. Results: I still get 1 – 4 visits per week for some variation of “raccoon wounds.”

The net result of this? About 3 – 8 visits per week on two rather weird and unrelated topics. But if I tried to build a readership off of this, I would have to write about a whooooole lot of weird stuff and win a series of long-tail searches before I started gaining traffic.

That’s why I do a lot better by focusing on writing, rather than writing a bunch of stuff as quickly and sloppily as possible.

Bottom line: anyone who’s interested in building a blogging following needs to devote more time and energy to their writing than their search engine optimization.

Twitter has become such a phenomenon, it’s almost easier to list people who are not on Twitter.

1) My kids
2) The Amish

(I take that back, now even the Amish are on Twitter. I’m still not letting my kids on it though.)

I’ve been getting ready for a Confluence Northnetwork event this week, where I’m on a blog panel discussion on the use of Twitter for corporations.

While Twitter is becoming popular among individual users, big companies are still a little slow to jump on the Twitter bandwagon (Twandwagon?), and so may be missing an important way to communicate with its customers.

If you’re lucky, you’ve only been receiving these DMs. If you’re not, you got hacked.

Michelle Wolverton at ChellePixie wrote a great post about how to recover from these Twitter phishing attacks.

Step 1 & 2 are the best advice: Stop clicking the links that get you hacked in the first place.//No seriously. Stop. (Erik’s step 3: Are you f—ing kidding me? I said stop it!!)

The problem is, these hacks are not just coming in from phishing links. We’re also being attacked by Twitter apps that ask for OAuth access into our Twitter accounts. Or it’s the older apps that ask for your name and password. It’s something we trusted, and our trust was betrayed.

It’s hard to resist sometimes. You hear about this great new app that will measure your Twitter followers, tell you how popular you are, and will even show you within three decimal places how much Chris Brogan likes you.

But don’t feel bad. Even John Wall of MarketingOverCoffee podcast fame — my favorite marketing podcast — got hacked too. Turns out it was one of several apps he was trying out.

The rest of Michelle’s advice, in a nutshell: clear your disk cache and quit your browser. Re-open it, and change your password, then revoke your OAuth permissions. You know what? Just go read her article, because she covers it much better than I will, and I don’t want her sending me angry emails about stealing her stuff.

The moral of all this? Some people are liars. Or damn liars. Or statisticians. If you were struck by the spam virus/phishing attack/e-demon possession, I’m not blaming you — very much — because you were probably tricked into becoming a victim. But you were tricked because you clicked on a link that came from someone you trusted. Yet, they were tricked by someone they trusted, and so on. You were lied to because they were lied to.

So here are three ways you can avoid this kind of thing in the future:

1. Don’t authorize any external, third party apps to access your Twitter account, whether you’re using OAuth or the old username/password method, UNLESS you know for sure that they’re safe. If you’re not sure, ask other people whether they’re using it. Don’t even blindly trust people like Chris Brogan or Jason Falls. After all, John Wall got tricked, and he’s pretty smart. If you’re not sure, play it safe, and just don’t use it to begin with.
2. If you get a DM from someone that doesn’t sound like something they would send, especially your friends, email them and ask if they sent it. If you don’t have an email, @reply them and ask. Don’t make them feel bad, just say something like “Just checking: Did you mean to send me a DM about how much money you made on Google?
3. Install the Power Twitter plug-in and the Bit.ly Preview plug-in on Firefox (step 4 – Use Firefox, not Internet Explorer). These plug-ins will let you view most shortened URLs to see if they’re really going where they claim. Bit.ly Preview will work on any bit.ly links on any website, and PowerTwitter will do it for nearly any link on Twitter. The latter has saved me from a few links.

Finally, change your password, even if you haven’t been hacked. It’s a good practice to have anyway, but changing it once in a while is just smart.

I thought, “Man, I miss the old Entrepreneur’s Alliance.” I miss seeing everyone on the 3rd Thursday of every month to have drinks and learn about how business started, failed and succeeded.

So, Ron asked if Professional Blog Service would like to be a co-sponsor of the event. I said, “Absolutely.”

Here is why, I would not have co-started Professional Blog Service, if not for the Entrepreneurs Alliance. It was there that I heard many stories from many different Indianapolis business people who were just like me. My all-time favorites were:

• Ray Compton – “You don’t need a lot of money to market, you need to be creative.”
• Harley Davidson – “There are three things needed to be a successful manager – knowledge, experience, and emotional competency.” With the emphasis on emotional competency.
• Jeff Smulyan – Great story about how he got started

And the other companies:

• Ritters Ice Cream
• JD Byrider
• Scott Jones
• Ontario Systems

The list really goes on and on. There were a lot of great companies and speakers that participated at the Entrepreneurs Alliance of Indiana.

So, Ron has resurrected this idea with his “At the Top” program. The venue is the excellent Skyline Club downtown. (Get it? “At the Top” on top of Indianapolis?) The format is going to be similar to what we did at EAI. There will be cocktails and appetizers with a guest speaker for each meeting.

So, if you are an Entrepreneur seeking inspiration from other Entrepreneurs that have gone through what you are experiencing, go to the “At the Top” meeting November 18, 2009.

What: At the Top
When: November 18, 2009
Time: 5:30p
Where: Skyline Club – Downtown Indianapolis

Professional Blog Service is very happy to be a co-sponsor of this important series of meetings. Without entrepreneurs, there is no economy. And we’re happy to help contribute our efforts to this event.

Photo: ExistDifferently

“Think of blogging like you’re writing an email,” I tell aspiring bloggers. “Put ‘Dear Mom, Let me tell you about this cool thing I learned today. . .’ and then write about that cool thing. Then, go back and delete the salutation, and you’re done.”

All in all, it’s pretty easy. I can do it a typical blog post (350 – 450 words) in about 20 minutes. Add another 10 – 15 for editing, and I’m done.

Of course, I’ve been a writer for nearly 23 years, so I’ve got a few secrets and techniques. I’ve written marketing copy, newspaper columns, speeches, and anything else you care to name, so I actually know how to write something well in 20 minutes.

The problem is that most new writers figure, “Hey, Erik takes 20 minutes to write a post, I can write it in 20 minutes too.”

Yes you can take 20 minutes, but it sure shows.

Listen, writing is easy, writing well is hard. Just because you know how to construct a complete sentence doesn’t mean you are actually a writer. I know where Middle C is on a piano, but that doesn’t make me a concert pianist.

A good blog post on the part of a beginning writer should take about 1 – 2 hours each. That includes reading, researching, writing, editing, re-editing, and then editing some more. Notice that the actual writing is only one small part of that list.

Yet, these noobie writers will vomit something out in a few minutes, hit ‘Publish’ and think they’re done. Or worse, they study all the SEO writing blogs and come up with little gems like “For free writing tips, download this free writing tips article about free writing tips.” (And then wonder why no one is reading their stuff.)

I’ve been seeing this a lot lately in people who profess to be professional writers and content creators. They’re the ones who are advising clients on how to create content that will set them apart in their industry, make them thought leaders, and help them win searches in the search engines.

I don’t know how to say this, except to just say it: Some of your writing just sucks.

There, I said it. I’m sorry. I don’t know how else to say it. I feel like Simon Cowell, but without the Botox.

It’s not that you’re bad people or that you’re trying to trick people. It’s just that, well, you look like you spent 20 minutes writing your post. There’s missing and misused punctuation, bad grammar, egregious misspellings, and incomplete sentences.

“But it’s blogging!” you’re saying. “It’s supposed to be more informal, and not bound by the same rules of business writing.”

True, true. But if you claim to be a writer, then for God’s sake, act like one! Writers have at least a basic grasp of language, storytelling, and sentence structure. Admittedly not all of them do (American novelist Leon Uris is famous for not being able to spell or use punctuation properly), but if you’re a product of our public schools and universities, I would hope you have some understanding of these basic concepts.

It’s especially important as blogging is starting to see some legitimacy in the business setting, and the decision makers are still concerned that their writers don’t sound like complete boobs churning out electronic doggerel for the world to see.

The problem is that I’ve seen more and more so-called “content creators” who are putting up some of their own stuff that looks like it was written by a 10th grader. I believe you should put as much care and attention into your own stuff as you do your clients. The way you react to the small things is the way you will react to everything. And if you can’t be bothered to write your own stuff well, how can you be counted on to write others’ stuff well?

As a writer and teacher in spirit, nothing warms my heart more than someone who tells me they want to learn how to be a writer. I love teaching them some of the lessons I’ve learned in the past 23 years, and showing them how to express the ideas they want to share with the world.

Just be prepared to put in the time and energy it will take to make your writing successful. Don’t just throw something up and hope no one will notice all the problems and mistakes. If you want to be able to write something in 20 minutes, it’ll take you several years.

(For the record, this took me 22 minutes.)

1. The “I Had a Bagel for Breakfast” Guy: These are the people most Twitter haters point to as their reason for, well, hating Twitter. And can you blame them?

   @PayAttention2Me: Walking the dog. BRB
   @PayAttention2Me: Have to visit the little Twitterer’s room.
   @PayAttention2Me: Late for a meeting.
   @PayAttention2Me: Gawd, this meeting is so BORRRING!

   And that’s just before frigging lunchtime.

   @PayAttention2Me: I tweet more boring shit before 9 am than most people do all day.

   Recommendation: It’s up to you. Some people like this kind of thing.

2. The Internet Marketer: The bane of the Twitter existence. First they screwed up email with their magic pills, counterfeit watches, and deposed royalty from far-off countries with millions of dollars. Then they cluttered up the Internet with videos of naked people doing stuff naked people like to do. And now they’re on Twitter, offering to teach me how to make money online, find more Twitter followers, and then bug the crap out of those followers so I can make more money while I sleep.

   “Tell your friends,” they say.

   “No thanks, I’d like to keep them,” I say, and then hit the Block/Spam button. Then I DM @Spam (Twitter’s Spam reporting account) with their user name for good measure. Then I create little effigies and set fire to them.

   To these people, I have one thing to say: We freaking hate you!!!

   Nobody likes you, nobody is paying attention to you, nobody wants to follow you, except for the other 30,000 people in your “Sign up here and get 2,000 followers per day” network. And you people have created such an obnoxious echo chamber that none of you are paying the slightest bit of attention to the fact that you’re only talking to a bunch of other spammers, none of whom are going to sign up for your services. You are beneath my contempt.

   Recommendation: Avoid them, block them, @Spam them.

3. The Thought Leader: These are people who are either trying to make a big name for themselves or have already done so. We often advise people trying to become thought leaders to use Twitter as part of their social media efforts. They try extra hard to add value to those they connect with, so they won’t pester you with a lot of pap. They’ll give you useful information and are someone worth paying attention to.

   Recommendation: It’s up to you, but if they’re in your industry, follow them.

4. Quote Generators: All these people do is send out motivational quotes like you’ve just grabbed a handful of fortune cookies at a Zig Ziglar seminar. And I have to tell you, I’m not a fan. I don’t mind the occasional motivational quote to help me kickstart my day. Just not seven times a day, every day This isn’t that valuable. If I want to be bombarded by motivational platitudes, I’ll create a Tony Robbins playlist on Pandora.

   Recommendation: Follow or don’t follow. There is no try.

5. Your Industry Colleagues and Community Members: These may be people you already know, people you only know by reputation, or people in your same field or industry. You want to be in contact with these people, because they can help you find solutions to problems, answer questions, and maybe even help you network your way to your next job. Use sites like Twitterment.com and NearbyTweets.com as a way to find the people you should connect with.

   Recommendation: Follow. Without hesitation.

By the way, you should always follow your friends. You’re already friends with them on Facebook and LinkedIn. Now is not the time to start questioning whether they add value to your lives.