Except, of course, for the part where everyone seemed to miss the most important snippet of the guidelines: Bloggers must clearly and conspicuously disclose any compensation. To me, the entire argument has completely overshot its landing. The consumer, the one to be protected by these rules, is being left out. Terrible assumptions are being made. No guidelines are being put forth.

What ‘clearly and conspicuously’ shouldn’t mean

There’s a certain gestalt to other forms of media that makes disclosure incredibly easy. This is the fine print at the bottom of a magazine ad or the “Paid Actor” notification in a TV commercial. It’s a package deal with the message right there at the bottom. Even if the consumer doesn’t read it, he or she is aware it’s there.

Blog posts, meanwhile, are like the black guy in a horror movie. Shortly after making an appearance, they’re brutally chopped up. After that, most people just see the head, or maybe the head and a trail of blood, then scream and run away.

There’s no gestalt to blog posts, and especially not to blogs as a whole.

• Disclosures at the bottom of posts mean nothing to most users. It’s not like a television ad with extremely small text. Disclosures at the bottom of posts (and especially those that are below the fold) just don’t (and won’t) get read. Much of the time, they won’t be seen.
• Disclosures on another page on the blog are simply ludicrous. Any blog with a bounce rate of less than 50% is doing well on attracting users to other parts of the site. Fedorable’s bounce rate is usually around 60%. That means only 40% make it to another page on Fedorable before leaving, and most of those aren’t going to the About page. In the end, only about 3-6% of Fedorable readers click to get there. This is equivalent to TV commercials only having to disclose 1 out of every 20 times they aired.

Sadly, a lot of bloggers are simply planning on putting two sentences on the end of their thirty-page, boring-as-hell About page. The less people who read it, the better. That’s just unfair to the consumer.

Blogging (and the Internet in general) is a different beast. If we’re going to put forth disclosure guidelines, let’s get it right. Here’s my take on ethical disclosure– not so  much the when or why, but the how.

Guidelines for ethical disclosure in blogging: The abbreviated disclosure message (v1)

Placement within the blog

• Disclosures should be placed after the headline/subheadline but before the content of the post.
• Related disclosures must be on the same page as the content of the post. Abbreviated posting (such as listings in a ‘Related Posts’ widgets) do not need to carry a disclosure. The actual text of the disclosure must be on the page, not linked from elsewhere.

Disclosing for the semantic web

• Disclosures should be placed within <em> or <strong> tags to signify their importance in the document.
• Semantic placement within an article should follow the visual placement (noted above). Disclosures must be part of the page source, and not added with javascript. This is to ensure that users with screen readers or users foregoing javascript have access to a standard method of disclosure.

Abbreviating disclosures

• To retain stylistic flow in their blog posts, bloggers may hide disclosure statements with javascript.
• In place of the message, a standard, short notification of “There is a disclosure associated with this post” with a Read More link can be used.
• The Read More link should reveal the entire notification, which is already semantically part of the document (and not added content from javascript).
• The message should be both hidden and displayed with javascript. Messages should not be hidden by default, unless a suitable alternative means of accessing the disclosure is available for non-javascript users.

Style considerations

• Disclosure statements should maintain the same readability as the body copy of the article including relative font size and background contrast. Disclosures may be plain, bolded or italicized.

Let’s aim for v2

I think my guidelines work pretty well. They make for the same “grain of salt” effect generated by the fine print in TV commercials. The abbreviated disclosure message as a standard would quickly inform consumers that there’s something else to know, without messing up the overall flow of a blog post. It also covers screen reader users or people who are quickly scanning through the blogosphere to find info about a product.

Of course, I might be forgetting certain situations. I do want to fight for the consumer here, but I also don’t want to leave the bloggers out in the cold. What do you think? What would you change or add?

My problem with the whole ordeal, and the point the article doesn’t really touch on, is that they’re paying interns to do this.

In other words, they’re not just practicing sleazy, backward ethics; they’re teaching them. Here’s an excerpt from the Reverb e-mail, written by Doug Kennedy, who I imagine has something like Overseer – Sleazebag Production on his business card:

My office did mention that you had issues with our staff and interns writing reviews for some of our clients games, I’m sure you are aware that in order to write a review on iTunes an individual needs to purchase the game or app and can only write one review. Our interns and employees write their reviews based on their own game play experience, after having purchased the game by themselves, a practice not uncommon by anyone selling games or apps and hardly unethical.

I could make the assumption that Doug is a complete idiot. I could just assume that nobody has mentioned anything about bias due to financial stake to him, that he never accidentally read something on disclosure ethics, or that he’s never heard anything about the mechanics of social media or the way the Internet works in general. But I won’t give him that benefit of a doubt. I have to just assume he’s just a sleazebag.

On some level, I can deal with that. For better or worse, shilling is a fairly widespread practice. For now we have to settle with the fact that, every now and then, a sleazebag like Doug gets caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

What I simply can’t deal with is the fact that he’s passing on these dubious ethics to interns, masquerading them as industry standard. Practices like this should only be taught as an example of what not to do.

They say it’s always good to end a blog post with a call to action. Well, here’s Reverb’s client list. I think you know what to do.

The word ethics leaves a lot of room for this type of behavior. In the end, being ethical simply means consistently following a set of rules. But the rules can be anything, and are for the most part left up to the individual or corporation. Take the following:

Company X: Public Relations Ethics Code

Rule 1: Create a new account (not a fake, but an “avatar” representing our corporate beliefs) any time a website negatively covers our news to inform the public in a friendly manner.

Rule 2: Ensure as many people as possible hear our news by sending out mass e-mails to thousands, or if possible tens of thousands, of users.

Rule 3: Encourage industry experts to tout our products by giving them regular financial incentive packages.

Rule 4: Sacrifice a kitten any time someone retweets a blog post.

Company X, if it followed this code with consistency (it’s hard to keep well stocked with kittens), would technically be ethical. But would they be good? Even the biggest cat hater would have a hard time thinking so.

Approach codes of ethics with caution and skepticism, because it’s the next place the sleazy companies will go in an effort to look good while still being bad.

Thousands and thousands of people used it, but some hated it. I personally never went back to the site, even for daily link browsing. After they changed it to an actual redirect, I was still wary of clicking digg.com short links.

It seems I had the right idea. Yesterday, Digg changed their short URL behavior (for all existing and new short URLs) to send the unwitting clicker to a Digg landing page. Nobody was notified beforehand.

A few hours later Kevin Rose tweeted that he had no idea this was going on.

Yeah, Kevin, we didn’t either.

So what can we learn from this?

No small changes

There are no small changes to a web app. URL shortening is a fairly simple, straightforward service. A tiny change gets noticed, and a big change like this can rock the entire landscape.

Values are a company thing, not a CEO thing

It’s interesting that Kevin Rose was on vacation for two weeks before this happened, but not particularly meaningful as a defense for Digg. Ethics should be company-wide. The “I didn’t know” or “It was the employee’s fault” excuse only gets so far.

Big players can ruin the game faster than small players

There’s anxiety brewing already over short URLs. Some people think they’re ruining the Internet. Digg has twice now delivered heavy blows to consumer confidence for an entire group of sites. It’s probably not fair that bit.ly (what I currently use) will suffer because of what Digg did, but that’s how it works.

I wonder if they used the “But everybody’s doing it!” defense.

The article was particularly surprising to me because I know that some PR and communication firms regularly engage in this practice. Lifestyle Lift, the company featured in the article, was engaging in the practice heavily, ordering employees to take time out of their day to post fake reviews.

But Lifestyle Lift is a fairly large company. The only reason they got caught is because they were really stupid about it, having multiple people to blow the whistle and also leaving an obvious online trail. Meanwhile thousands more fake reviews are posted every day by unscrupulous “reputation management” firms around the country. Will they stop now, knowing there’s a definite cost associated with it?

I’m sure the ones in New York will think about it for a second, then go back to business as usual. The firms in other states won’t miss a beat.

Another question is one of accountability. If a sleazebag company pays a sleazebag PR firm to post fake reviews, who picks up the tab when they get caught for being “cynical, manipulative and illegal” (As the New York attorney general so eloquently put it)?

If you haven’t, here’s a summary: Guy watches guitar get broken by baggage handlers. Guy gets nowhere with customer service. Guy makes suspiciously-high-production-value music video on Youtube complaining about his treatment.

And the crowd goes wild. It’s at nearly 400,000 views already.

I have to wonder if Dave Carroll, the man behind the video, was just that pissed, or if he’s some kind of marketing genius. Or maybe a little of both.

United has since responded in an attempt to suppress the raging wildfire. I don’t know exactly what they did and I don’t care. It’s too late now.

I used to think I was alone in this harsh insensitivity towards corporate responses like this. After all, they’re doing something, right? A quick glance at the Youtube comments, or at many of the blog posts on this ordeal, shows me I’m actually among the least angry now.

Too little, too late. Is this the new face of social media? Should big companies start investing more in prevention, and less in cure?

Then again, for the viral video, perhaps it’s appropriate that there is no cure.

Does this smell like bullshit to anyone else?

I’ve looked around the net for statistics on just how many online, on-site (i.e. sites like Amazon or Newegg) reviews are real, written by users who had no conflicts of interest. I can’t find anything. Are 10% of reviews planted by scoundrel “marketing” firms? 25%? 50%? Even more?

How could we even find out? Where do we start in this epic fight against evil? I have some ideas.

Language

You can guess, with 83% accuracy, whether the writer of a given text is male or female. Surely we can use a method like this to detect when people are raving a bit too much about a product, or recalling way too many details about their recent dining experience.

Men and women are mostly the same. Online shills are the lowest form of human life. They should stick out like a sore thumb.

Location

We can tell where reviews are coming from. If we have particularly prolific IP addresses pumping out reviews, can’t we weed them out? Joe P. Normal isn’t going to write 200 reviews a week for a select few products across multiple websites.

I’m sure that some of the major sites are doing this already, but once again I can’t find much information on it. This is something that should be publicized more. (And, please, if you have information you’d like to volunteer, comment!)

Fighting online shills is a noble cause. If you’re doing it, let the world know!

Shame

It’s no longer enough to simply delete shill reviews. We have to do something to discourage the practice in general.

My first suggestion is simple:

We can’t really bring the stocks back (right?), but the concept of public humiliation as punishment is still very real, especially in the realm of public relations and online marketing.

And there’s another problem here: These shills, as I’ve already noted, are some of the most despicable people alive. They’re shameless, leaving us with just one target: Their clients.

Even the most unscrupulous PR people around know that it usually pays to tell the truth. Why? Because if you lie and it gets out, it’s that much more damaging (and thus, expensive). We need to make it so there’s a high cost associated with shilling.

Let’s fight back

In a world that’s all a-twitter, the problem of shills is going to grow just as fast, or even faster, than the expanding sphere of social media. We need a system set in place to fight back and protect the integrity of online opinion.

What do you think?