Well did you see the big buzz about the Huffington blog?  Ariana Huffington of the Huffington Post blog claimed that George Clooney was a guest blogger and she did this to get more hits on her blog of course. 

Turns out she wrote the entry by bringing together a bunch of George’s quotes.  She added her own zip, got the OK from the handler and then posted. 

Bloggers are loyal to her but thankfully are more loyal to the purity of blogging…they gave it to Arianna.  It took her some days to come up with a response…she said that she was sorry and wouldn’t do it again and she made a mistake.

Now this brings up two subjects I have hit on before.  Blogging is nothing without honest contributions and the power of honesty when faced with a crisis.

I have said it many times, blogging is about honesty.  It is about the self policing that goes on in the blogosphere that keeps those with questionable ethics in place.  And i have also said before that it doesn’t take long for the bloggers to find the truth!  I love that about the blogging world!

The other point I like making, especially for my corporate clients, is that if there is a crisis, admitting to making the mistake and coming up with a plan to prevent the mistake from happening in the future is the best way to handle your public!  It is a simple thing, admit you are wrong and make it right the best you can.

Arianna may loose some bloggers and some numbers from her site; it may take her awhile to get those hits again, but if she stays true to her word, and works more honestly, she will make her come back like any other human who makes a mistake and makes ammends.

Quite a few times now I have been faced with clients or potential clients who say that they don’t want to blog because they are scared (these are corporate clients).  Scared that a bad situation for their company could blow out of control through the blog, scared because a bad situation could happen because of something said on a blog. 

Well let me counter that.

If a company blogs on a regular basis..they are honest and consistent, then other bloggers will come to rely on them for company information and insight.  When times are good, this is what happens.  A company, when “talking” on the blog, becomes a solid member of the blogosphere.  When in bad times where a crisis for the company occurs, and the blogger sticks to their guns by blogging honestly and consistently, the company will have produced an effective crisis management tool, the blogger and the blogoshere.  Other bloggers already trust your company and the contributor(s) so if your company blogger continues in the same vain when trouble hits, your company will be believed and no doubt supported by a group of people who have become a community through blogging.

Now, other companies say that they are scared to blog in fear that something said on a blog may be misconstrued or misinterpreted.  Yes, there is a chance of this happening but doesn’t this happen anyway in the press or in life (like at a party when you think no one is listening)?  Don’t be afraid to send your message out because it could be misunderstood…this is not the philosophy you took when building your company or division in the first place!

While there will always be a group out there who don’t understand or are miffed by a direction a company takes, the overall affect of a company blog will be positive because you and your blogger(s) are out there, taking chances, communicating and connnecting. 

Well good news for me is that finally after working like a dog, my website is up and movin and groovin…check it out, www.Creative-ConceptsLLC.com

Also some news, Clarke Thomas, who I have refenced on ethics, is using some thoughts and quotes from this blog for his “Good News;Bad News” course at the Academy of Lifelong Learning at Carneige Mellon University.

Happy weekend, I am done until Monday.

I have talked about blogging and I have talked about ethics in past entries but what if I combine the two and talk about ethics within the blogging community.

The critics of blogging say that a blog is not a reliable source of information because there is no way to monitor the truth on the blogs. These same critics say anyone can say anything and so the information is not viable. I do agree that there is a great freedom in the blogosphere to say what you want about what you want. What I don’t agree with is that it is not reliable!

The blogoshpere is a self policing community that not only watches itself but watches the news, politics, the arts and the social scene to name a few focal points. Based on what circles you run in or what research you partake in, you may have different snippets of truths that when thrown in with other snippets constitute the whole story, a true story. Products, services and even careers from the “outside”world have been brought down because the truth came out in blog form. Because of these snippets of truths coming from every angle world wide, it would not be beneficial for anyone to lie in their blog….if they do, they are not taken seriously and then are shunned by other bloggers. Blogging is all about the truth or it wouldn’t be worth it for anyone to turn to this form of communication which invovles listening and telling!

Bloggers have nothing to fear either. Many bloggers are passionate about their subject matter and really care about it. They have no motivation to make up stories for a short lived buzz about their blog.

PR/Media people on the other hand have a lot to lose when telling their clients’ story. They have money to lose from a loss of client or a lack of buzz about their client. If they don’t get their client out in the media, then the client fires them, so what do the media/pr people do? They make things up to make their client look good or to get the buzz going. The client is the priority, not the end users.

So who are you going to believe? Jack and Jill from the midwest who care deeply about their new mini van and they blog about it, or the flashy pr company who is trying to make their Mini van client happy? Where is the ethics check in the media? They have just met it, it is called the blogosphere!

Check this out…an article writen by Clarke Thomas on ethics…guess there are many on the same page with this one…very timely next to my last entry for this blog!

Clarke Thomas: Business ethics — not an oxymoron

The scandalous misdeeds found in such corporations as Enron, WorldCom, Tyco and HealthSouth now are raising questions about the schools of business administration where many executives got their training.>

In a new book William C. Frederick points out, “After all, Enron’s Jeff Skilling and Andrew Fastow, two major figures at the center of that company’s troubles, held MBA degrees from well-known business schools,” Harvard and Northwestern, respectively. Mr. Frederick, professor emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh’s Katz Graduate School of Business, discusses the matter in his newly published “Corporation, Be Good! The Story of Corporate Social Responsibility.”