I know a lot of business owners who are interested in participating in social media like Facebook, Twitter or a blog.  But who’s got the time to keep all that content current?

So lots of people turn to an outside writer for help.  Is that a good idea?

Well, this turns out to have a lot of controversy in the Internet marketing community.  Some people think it’s unethical to publish content that others have written for you unless it’s clearly stated that way.  Others think it’s just like business as usual — when’s the last time the CEO actually wrote a press release?

Small Business Trends just published an article with some ‘ghostwriter’ guidelines for working with outside consultants for making content for your online promotion.  Here’s the issue in a nutshell:  the idea of blogs and other social media is that they are authentic expressions of opinion and experience by knowledgeable people.  But if someone outside your company ghosts the stuff for you, is it really authentic?  Remember that blogs, et al, are very personal expressions. The problem is really about that personal authority behind the statement which is posed in a different way online than it is in traditional corporate communications.

Personally, I think the ghostwriting is not only necessary but is fine to do as long as the information is valid/true and it is not published under an alias or someone else’s name.  You can easily publish blog posts as ‘Company X Staff’ and be truthful about it.

Here’s another attempt to deal with the ethics of the matter (link pulled from the article cited above).

My name is Glenn Silloway, owner of The Net Sells Internet Marketing firm, and these are my actual words.  I promise.

Does it make sense to you that Google, et al, would like to rank search results based on what visitors think is relevant?  In other words, respond to your search query with results that other people have liked?  It sure makes sense to me — and now Ian Lurie has another common sense post about how user behavior can affect search results.  This has been a hobbyhorse of mine for some time, at least since reading John Battelle’s Search.  Remember from that book that he talked about how Google could measure the entire clickstream — the database of intentions.  With all that computing power plus a bunch of the smartest analysts in the known universe, how could Google not want to measure the way you use a site:  do you click on the link?  do you stay awhile on that site?  do you click through to other pages?  do you bookmark it?  Sites that attract this kind of use for a query are relevant sites.  This is important to get, and Lurie’s post tells you why:  when Google can measure how you interact with a site you find in a search query result, the importance of the quality of the site’s content, navigation, and usability are magnified.  It’s back to basics, folks:  authoritative content and excellent usability — and these are now core requirements of SEO.

Using social networks for advertising has proved to be a real challenge for marketers.  Users want the networks for personal socializing and dislike ads.  Yet, the personal recommendation of a product is the best marketing anyone can get, so marketers aren’t giving up.  Marketing Vox posts that in another attempt to harness the power of social networks, Facebook is introducting Connect.  Connect makes an existing third party website (like Hulu, Discovery or Digg) available to a group of friends to view and comment on together.  In other words, this external content becomes part of the conversation.  Want to watch a video together on Hulu?  Do it through Facebook and share the time with your friends.  This makes the event more valuable to advertisers, in theory.  As always, the ultimate force driving this is how attractive the content itself is:  if Facebook friends share an interest in content that is valuable to them, the ads will be seen.  If the content isn’t any good, forget about it.  So, leveraging the content of a site like Hulu makes good sense — and undoubtedly means Hulu will want part of the action.

Ian Lurie has 15 tips for Business Bloggers that might help to rescue your business blog from the dustbin. But is it too late?  Not long ago (July 2008, according to Wired magazine in Nov 2008 issue), Jason Calacanis quit posting to his blog.  Happens all the time, except Jason was one of the mega-bloggers from a few years ago, and literally made millions at it. What happened?  Blogging has become the darling of the marketing set (mea culpa) and therefore mainstream. And, therefore, boring, predictable and commercial.  Still.  Still.  A blog is new content, freshly minted in easy, zippy prose, inviting comments from interested people.  Isn’t there a way to make a business blog interesting?  I mean, Google has a zillion of them, and I know I watch a few of those quite closely. And Ian’s too.  It’s that same old thing again that most don’t like to hear:  you need to put some real effort into it, in the right spirit.  See Ian’s nice post for starters.

Syndicating content you make to other blogs and websites is a good thing, especially if you get inbound links and traffic from it (which is one of your purposes). But it also creates duplicate content issues, forcing the search engines to determine which content source is the original one that deserves the better rank for the content. What is the smart thing to do?

Vanessa Fox started a string on ranking on syndicated content last May. She offers several ideas for how to boost your original content, the most important of which is to include an absolute link back to your original content in anything you syndicate to others.  Yet, Google et al might still consider the syndicated use of the content as a higher ranking because the website or blog it is on is considered more authoritative.  The search engines will still try to eliminate duplicate content, and your original work might be the version that gets eliminated.

A hyperactive version of this problem is when your content gets scraped and re-used on somebody else’s website (a client of mine produces the best event calendar in our county and it is repeatedly “borrowed” by scrapers).  How can we ensure that we get credit for our good work?

I don’t think there’s a 100% solution to this.  However, Google’s Webmaster Blog assures us that they “look at various signals to determine which site is the original one”.  Adding the inbound links to your site will always help, obviously, but beyond that you need to persist in keeping your content clean (limit the duplicate content that is unnecessary) and identify the files you want search engines to see in your Sitemap XML submission.  You do not want to give up the benefits of syndication, and you cannot stop scrapers — you can only make sure your content is fresh, well-formulated technically, and syndicated to people who will play fair with you in giving credit for your content.

Or your enemy?  I work with a lot of CMS ’cause my clients work with a lot of developers.  And I have learned to hate some of them (the CMS not the clients or the developers).  I hate systems that insert garbage into the URLs and then don’t allow us to rewrite the garbage into something appealing to search engines and people.   I hate systems that don’t allow us to see the code and manage the code on our own pages.  I hate systems that make it impossible to move a website to any other hosting or CMS environment (and that’s a lot of them).

Ian Lurie recently posted about SEO-ready CMS, and there’s some good points in it if you are looking for a new system (or building a new website).  A system I have enjoyed on several small business sites is the fck editor, which I first learned about from Synthetic Kit.  This is a flexible and intuitive system that does not require any installation on the client computer–it will remind you of working with Word (only fewer crashes).  I’ve also run across it in sites built by Dennis Clevenger over at CleverConcepts, and it seems it can be installed in different versions that offer the feature set you need (but ask Dennis about that).