With all the chatter about ghost blogging, ghost writing and otherwise ghostifying in the blogosphere last week, I’ve been thinking about how this applies to what you’re reading right now. What would you think if I told you I haven’t been writing my own blogs this whole time? That whole story about
wearing the Headless Horseman costume in our staff meeting? True, but someone else put pen to paper (fingers to keyboard?) and hashed out a blog about it. Or what if I told you Experience Manager Adam was too busy
actually making 25 gallons of apple butter to write about it, so I wrote it for him?
Let’s be honest: none of that would make sense, and it’s not true. First, who would write a blog for a marketing assistant? Second, Adam obviously would have made at least 50 gallons of apple butter.
Joking aside, when Lindsay Manfredi, ghost blogger and founder of
Linzstar, Inc., brought up the topic on
her own blog last week, the Indy-ghost-blogging pot was officially stirred. Comments, blogs in response and enough tweets to feed a small twitterverse ensued—and for all these I am, in the spirit of the forthcoming holiday, thankful. They got me thinking. Would I ghost blog? Would anyone ever let me? (Probably not…) However, whether you enjoy and make a living ghost blogging, like Manfredi, or contest it’s lying unless there’s some identification of who the actual authors are, like
TrendyMinds PR pro Elizabeth Friedland explained in
her follow-up blog, I have to ask: does it even make sense for your company?
And the fact is that at Conner Prairie, on this staff blog, it doesn’t. Do I ghost write? Of course. Just last Friday I composed a memo addressed to our employees that was signed with someone else’s name. I’ll do the same when I submit an award nomination soon that will come from someone who didn’t write it.
But when it comes to our blog, each post is so personal, so representative of the experiences of each individual, I don’t believe anyone could express those better than the person who encountered them. I’m not saying anything positive or negative about the quality or reach of our content. In fact, I’m not even saying anything about my personal views on ghost writing and ghost blogging. I am saying you can count on this blog to share stories from different parts of the prairie, written by the person whose name is stamped at the bottom.
What do you think? What level of transparency would you expect or insist from Conner Prairie’s blog? From other companies’ blogs? What about internal communications or media relations?