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.

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).