There is widespread agreement in the social media community that the principle of disclosure is vital to honest and open communications, and that it is necessary for businesses participating in the conversation to uphold these principles.
We believe that the first step is for companies to create a simple disclosure policy so their employees and agencies know the appropriate and transparent ways of participating.
To get things started, the Blog Council has published a do-it-yourself Disclosure Best Practices Toolkit to make it easy for companies to do the right thing.
Go to http://blogcouncil.org/disclosure and make it your own:
- Discuss, comment, critique, contribute
- Create your own policy
- Share your version with the community
We’re pleased to be able to help push the disclosure issue to the top of the agenda for businesses participating in the blogosphere, as well as the opportunity to add structure to the debate over some very complex issues.
If these issues are important to you, please help spread the message that disclosure is never optional, but it is easy to do well.
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Very Interesting Michael
Let me try the new disclosure toolkit with my interactive team and see how it goes
Sorry to say we want through the pain of working closely with legal to get a policy hammered out
So anything like this is a blessing!
Michael – this is certainly a step in the right direction. It strikes me as somewhat ironic and sad that disclosure and transparency are difficult for companies – but that’s the world we work in, where SOX has not yet consumed marketing and PR. Also, good idea to leave it as open source bones, as the implementation will certainly depend on a company’s individual culture. Looking forward to hearing more about brands putting it into action.
What a sensible idea! I look forward to seeing feedback on the guidelines from in-the-trenches corporate bloggers.
I applaud the effort to communicate out a series of best practices.
However I can’t help be noticy the irony of this post. The other seem to know that the author is “Michael”, but I don’t see an author behind this post other than, Posted by Blog Council Staff
Good opportunity to share a best practice I guess. Transparency allows you to establish authenticity and trust with your audience that traditional marketing can’t. It allows you to move away from an institutional voice to a more humanized persona.
Again I applaud the sharing of the practices, but I believe having the author name and profile in the post would help demonstrate how transparency is practiced.
Hi Bob,
You’re absolutely right. Posting an author name and profile is a best practice most companies would probably want to adopt.
Since we’re a membership organization, though, we prefer to write as “Blog Council Staff”. After all, we want to keep the focus of the organization on members … like you and Intel, for example!
We do have a prominent link to an “about our authors” section on the sidebar. That section includes links to our staff bios. That way, you know who’s writing the posts.
Plus, every time we leave a comment, we post under our name.
Cheers,
Michael
—-
michael@blogcouncil.org
312-932-9000
I am a Blog Council employee and this is my personal opinion.
Good stuff Michael and better yet you responded promptly to the critique. Transparency is alive and well with Blog Council!
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