Finally finished listening to the marathon (for a podcast) recording of the Social Media Club in San Francisco from last week, discussing blogger ethics. The talk was prompted largely by the recent Edelman/Wal-Mart kerfuffle (or was that a fiasco? Shel?), in which a sunny blog about camping out in Wal-Mart parking lots turned out to be sponsored by an Edelman-created, Wal-Mart sponsored group– without disclosure. 19 people met at CNET‘s offices on October 25, led by Chris Heuer, Brian Solis and Kristie Wells of the Social Media Club, and also attended by TechCrunch‘s Mike Arrington, among others.

I recommend taking some time to listen or at least skim. A few of the interesting topics covered in this freewheeling conversation, and my comments:

• Blog credibility– do bloggers need to adopt mainstream journalistic ethics? What should the rules be on disclosure? How can we decide if a blog has credibility?
• What was missing from this part of the talk was the concept of audience responsibility. It is my belief that there is no such thing as absolute objectivity in any medium — and the audience has a responsibility to themselves to be critical consumers and “consider the source.” If you read a blogger long enough, you will know his or her tendencies, opinions, and tendencies enough to know how to interpret praise for or slamming of a company.
• What are the ethics of bloggers accepting swag, gifts or product from companies? Again, related to disclosure, but going into more detail about the relationships between companies and bloggers.
• I was left with the impression that in part we are re-learning lessons that were learned ages ago with the “old” media: swag gets old because the journalists see through it, giving–or lending- out products are necessary to get reviewed, and has become SOP in the old media world– why would it be different with bloggers? (There are probably a bunch of reasons why, but let’s not ignore lessons already learned).
• Conflict resolution: there was a proposal to have in place some sort of rule that conflicts involving blog conduct (say, the Edelman/Wal-Mart stuff) first be addressed “offline” or privately, rather through blog posts and comments out in the open.
• I would think many bloggers would have a real problem with that, as the idea runs counter to the idea of every conversation in social media being out in the open. That’s not completely true now, of course, and I am sure there were a lot of substantive private communications in the Edelman case before the belated official statement. I would, however, expect resistance to a formalized structure from some quarters.

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