My boss wants me to blog for him. He is basically under the opinion that if he reads my post, then he approved it, it should go under his name. What is your feeling on this?
My own preference is that if you aren’t going to write your own stuff, why bother having a “blog” in the first place? Why not just post articles or press releases to your site, so you get the content and SEO benefit and be done with it?
Right now, business blogging is all the rage. Online marketing gurus promote blogging like it’s the next marketing magic bullet, but the truth is that blogging isn’t right for a lot of businesses. It takes a lot of work to post regularly, manage comments, and interact with other blogs in your niche.
So it’s not surprising that ghost blogging (paying others to write your blog posts) has become more popular. Writers realized that writing blog posts isn’t that much different from writing articles and they could charge for it. Business owners realized they could pay people to write for them and get all the benefits of blogging without the time commitment. Sounds great, right?
When ghost blogging first appeared on the scene, the “purist” bloggers were outraged – since they were promoting blogging as a means of authentic and personal communication in a world of “corporate fronts”. Books like The ClueTrain Manifesto and Naked Conversations were wildly popular and blogging was supposed to do away with press releases, jargon, and market-speak in favor of conversational tone.
These days, while you’ll still find outbursts of blogger scorn whenever something seems deliberately deceiving – like the fake Wal-Mart blog, PR companies ghost blogging, and even an April Fool’s joke by a popular author – for the most part, the vast majority of your readers won’t care. They are just there for the content, not to build a relationship or personally interact with you.
I think ghost blogging is more acceptable in the blogosphere if you don’t attribute posts to a specific author – rather then saying an author wrote the content when he/she actually didn’t. It may never be appropriate in some blogging circles, but in others, it’s much more commonplace.
In the end, however, it comes down to the personal choice of the person paying you for content.
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Ghostwriting for a senior is both an honor and a responsibility. I had the good fortune of being given the choice for specific cases. I would not put up with it as a regular organizational process.
I clarify his concept and draft the wording, thus I can influence the boss (if he reads and understands it) and it gives me a chance to get larger parts of the company behind an idea of mine.
Yet the piece is not fully his nor is it fully mine in the end. It is co-created, and as a boss in a hierarchical organization, he traditionally gets to sign it. That makes it a bit a fake because it perpetuates a lie about authorship. I get the compensation, more such work in future but not the fame. Fortunately, in the company I work for, I can decline such assignments.
Awakened executives let the ghost materialize and name both authors. I find working with such leaders is more productive and rewarding.