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.

I think this is an important story, and the Techcrunch post by Brian Solis is a really nice piece for introducing how social media create an ecology of distribution and visibility.  In other words: you can gain viewers and traffic by increasing visibility through this multiple-channel — user driven —  distribution sequence.

In a nutshell, Solis reports that the SEC is set to recognize a blog post as meeting its disclosure requirements for companies’ financial reports.  Traditionally, these kinds of announcements have been distributed via public relations wires, picked up mainly by reporters, analysts, and investors who are part of a small, but attentive audience.  The issue has to do with Full Disclosure rules that are intended to guarantee the fairness of the market.  Disclosing information to analysts or investors on a selective basis biases the market in favor of those people, and the aim of the FD rules is to prevent that in favor of more timely and transparent disclosure of financial information.

The news for Social Media is summarized in the following quote from the SEC’s announcement on rule changes in the FD regs (due to be in force October 23, 2008):

As a general matter, acceptable methods of public disclosure for purposes of Regulation FD will include press releases distributed through a widely circulated news or wire service, or announcements made through press conferences or conference calls that interested members of the public may attend or listen to either in person, by telephonic transmission, or by other electronic transmission (including use of the Internet). [my emphasis]

Why the big deal?  It is official confirmation of the cost effective use of the Internet (blog posts, social media updates, even Twitter trails) in a business context, legitimizing an increasingly valuable and widely used method of communication. There will be a financial community built around this with RSS feeds, Twitter trails, and announcements through traditional email and PR distribution channels that will make this information quickly available to a much wider audience.

This is a breakthrough.