Disclosure

Recently the FTC updated the rules about proper disclosure when receiving compensation for promoting a product or service in a blog post. Fines for failure to properly disclose compensation could be up to $11,000. The FTC states:

While decisions will be reached on a case-by-case basis, the post of a blogger who receives cash or in-kind payment to review a product is considered an endorsement. Thus, bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service.

The need to disclose material compensation seems easy enough, right? Readers feel cheated when proper disclosures aren’t given. Still, it can be hard to do.

In a recent book review of Anne Gentle’s Community and Conversation, Sarah O’Keefe is careful to add the following:

[Disclosure: I reviewed an early draft of this book. I have met Anne in person a few times and we have ongoing email and blog correspondence.]

When I first read her disclosure, I was surprised. It didn’t seem that necessary to me. Nevertheless, I appreciated it. In my book review, I probably didn’t disclose as much as I should have. I did mention the fact that I received a free copy of the book, but I could have also added that I’ve met Anne several times at conferences, that we interact on the Intercom article advisory board, and that links to her book in my post point to my Amazon affiliate page.

Approval

A while ago Penelope Trunk wrote a post revealing some intimate information that seemed to cross boundaries of what was appropriate. She followed up with a post on How to blog about a co-worker or someone close to you. In her follow-up post, she explains the predicament:

What you know the most about is what you can offer the most insight about. And you probably know that telling stories is  always more compelling than talking in generalities. But if you tell stories, you need people to be in the stories. So if you want to write insightfully, then using stories about people close to you makes sense.

Writing about a co-worker is similar to writing about a sex partner: you know a lot about the person, both good and bad. So you could ruin your relationship by writing about them. So you have to get good at writing about co-workers without pissing them off.

Penelope hits the issue right on target: you need to include story to avoid boring your readers, but sometimes including all the details of the story violates your relationships with your “characters,” who are real people with independent lives.

As bloggers we sometimes want to write posts that share frustrating or juicy experiences that happen at work, but we have to refrain, make the details more general, because we don’t want to jeopardize our relationships at our jobs. As Penelope says, omitting these details often means omitting the story. Sure enough, when I do this, my posts are more boring.

Penelope’s compromise is to show your posts to people before clicking the publish button. I had no idea she gave her characters veto rights, but she does:

I explain to them that they will always have veto rights, so they don’t have to worry about what they do or say with me. They are always surprised, and they are always relieved.

Her advice works well to keep you from stepping over the line. If you would feel uncomfortable showing the post to your characters, you may want to rethink the post.

As a blogger, sometimes the people I talk with are cautious about what they say to me (and rightly so). For example, at last year’s STC Summit, I had lunch with Alan Houser, chair of the conference. I was asking him some details about sessions that were canceled, and he was careful to let me know what I could and couldn’t say on my blog. As he spoke, I sometimes felt a bit like a journalist, even though I wasn’t even considering a post at the time. To put people at ease, let them know they will have veto rights before you publish anything.

Representation

Because I’m a full-time employee rather than an independent consultant, I’m aware of the way I’m representing my organization. I’ve deliberated about whether I should even include my organization’s name in my About page, but I did. I’m in a peculiar situation — I work for the IT department of the LDS Church, aka the Mormons.

Because of my position, I’m careful to avoid any views on my blog that might be at odds with my organization. Fortunately, I don’t write about political, religious, or even cultural topics — the focus of my blog is “safe.” I don’t have any views that would be at odds with my employer anyway. But the way I represent myself on my blog is something that’s on my mind before I publish anything.

The story of Chez Pazienza is a good one to consider in a discussion about representation. Chez was a CNN producer fired because of the views he expressed on his blog. When I first heard about Chez, I assumed he’d been writing crazy, off-the-wall posts or posting rumors and gossip about colleagues or revealing confidential company information (like the Twitter messages here).

But really, Chez is an intelligent, polished writer who felt that mainstream media was losing its fire, succumbing to shareholder-encouraged stories and shying away from the real stories. He found blogging to be an outlet to pursue real issues and to express his voice (Say What You Will: Requiem for a News Career). However, the liberal bent on his blog conflicted with the more conservative, unbiased reporter role he needed to maintain at CNN, so they let him go.

Chez’s story made me realize that it’s not so much the irresponsible rants against your boss or the inappropriate revealing of co-worker details that gets you into trouble. It’s the expression of an improper point of view, however eloquently expressed. If your position is at odds with your company’s point of view, it can make your employer think twice about keeping you around.

Sensationalism

The final consideration in responsible blogging is to avoid sensationalism. Often times it’s tempting to push an extreme position to get attention. This can be a strategy for raising awareness of an issue. But if you’re constantly rocking the boat just to get attention, to attract controversy and comments, that’s irresponsible blogging.

For example, last year I posted a survey on my site about whether other technical writers felt the profession of technical writing was “a sellout or fallback career.” I didn’t think much of my poll. These were terms a colleague who teaches literature at a university told me his students used to describe technical writing. I was preparing a presentation for the students, so I wanted to have raw data to refute their preconceptions.

Maybe tech writers were bored that day, but the Techwr-l listserv went wild with my poll. They thought I was purposely being controversial just to attract attention from their listserv. Here are a few of their comments:

I declined to vote because I suspect the author might have phrased it carefully to evoke just this sort of “discussion” and, to me, it seems a pointless question otherwise. (Geoff)

Here’s an ironic twist to the conspiracy theory that the writer of the question wrote the question in a way to start a discussion. A web search of the question will point to this list and techwr-l tends to get the higher search rankings, so its results appear first and will be ahead of the page with the poll. If the poll question was written to draw traffic, then the discussion may have a less than desirable effect for driving traffic. (Lauren)

Did you read the actual poll? It was a discussion troll. Hey, I’m a poet, and I don’t even know it! (Bill)

Although I didn’t purposely intend to be sensational, purposes are often made irrelevant by perceptions. This bit of sensationalism got me into hot water, even if it did attract attention to my blog.

Conclusion

As you blog, remember that you have a relationship with your readers — a relationship that requires you to disclose any important information, especially monetary, that might bias your views. Don’t ruin relationships with those around you by revealing private details of their lives without approval. Ensure you don’t represent your company in a negative light. And choose balanced, honest posts rather than sensationalism.

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Download MP3 (to download, right-click and select Save Target As)
Duration: 32 min.

Deborah (Shapiro) Hemstreet

In this podcast, I talk with Deborah (Shapiro) Hemstreet about the personalities of technical communicators, based on research she conducted as part of her masters degree. I got the idea of interviewing Deborah from on a discussion on the Techwr-L listserv about a movie called The Technical Writer. In the discussion, Deborah wrote,

I read the reviews… And it sounds to me (without having watched) that it is a caricature of the stereotypical idea of a technical writer (introverted, neurotic and a geek)… But just the reviews are enough to turn me off to the movie.

Having said that, it made me think of my own research a few years back when I was doing my MA in technical communication… My thesis was on the personality characteristics of technical communicators. It surveyed over 220 technical communicators from around the world. I used a validated personality test based on the five-factor model of personality along with a questionnaire about each person’s professional practice, and a demographics section.

I mention this, because of the whole issue of the stereotypical introverted technical writer. My findings were the exact opposite of what we would expect to see. The majority of writers were extroverted. When I correlated professional practice to the personality characteristics, it appeared that effectiveness improved with extroversion, with managers being the most extroverted. The majority of introverts were editors (made sense to me), and only a few rated negatively with regards to what the five-factor model called neuroticism. Interestingly, those few writers ranked low in professional practice.

I find the topic of personalities extremely relevant in our field. At times, technical writers spend much of their day isolated in their cubes writing documentation. They have little interaction with others. Other days, technical writers are constantly interacting with project managers, designers, and other subject matter experts (SMEs). Technical writers are almost investigative journalists, tracking down reluctant SMEs to extract information, influencing product design change, training groups of users on new releases, and voicing opinion during conference-room-packed meetings.

I’m fascinated by Deborah’s conclusion about extroversion (which she defines as being open, friendly, and outgoing). Those who are more extroverted tend to be more effective in their careers. In this podcast, we talk about how she measure effectiveness, as well as strategies for personality change. We also discuss neuroticism, and how tendencies toward perfectionism can be detrimental to one’s success.

Additional Resources from Deborah

The following links are additional resources from Deborah.

Center for Applied Cognitive Studies

The above link provides information for practical applications of the Five Factor Model of personality. They redefine the OCEAN scores into terminology that is a lot easier to follow and more applicable to technical communicators.

Five Factor Personality Test

This is a link to the original site where she discovered the test. Anyone can take this test and get their score immediately. The answers will be used for ongoing research. The author of this test gave me permission to use it and felt it would meet my research purposes. I could not provide self-testing with scores, however, as I did not have the use of the scripts that this website provides.

Introversion Turned Inside Out (.ppt)

This is the presentation that she gave with a colleague at the STC Conference two years ago. It provides more information about introversion versus extraversion.

The Secrets of Effective Technical Communicators

Other investigators are now finding support for Deborah’s findings.

Contacting Deborah

People are welcome to correspond with Deborah at deborah.hemstreet@gmail.com and to visit her site (currently under development) at www.tech-challenged.com.

Audio Note

I was hoping the audio would be crisper and clearer, but Skype gave me a little trouble. I amplified and balanced the audio as best I could.

Let’s say that I wanted to finally start a blog (it seems de rigeur for techwriters (and many others) to have a website and at least one blog
indicated on their business cards, resumes, etc.) … I want to know about the practical exigencies of getting it done and out there…. What’s the “usual” approach … Let’s further say that it’s not intended as a professional tool, but still semi-seriously as an adjunct to a hobby or a cause, or a passionate interest.

If you want to enter the blogosphere in style, use a self-hosted WordPress blog from WordPress.org. I once made a video tutorial on installing WordPress here (and a longer one here).

If you’re not very technical (or if you don’t want to worry about breaking your blog), use a hosted blogging service, such as Typepad or, cringe, Blogger. If you’re not that committed to actually spending money to blog, use a free but still-respectable host, such as WordPress.com. If you live in Vancouver, use Expression Engine (lot of EE guys up there).

Who is using what … and:

- what do you especially like about the method or service that
you use?

- what would you change next time … ?

I use WordPress that I host on BlueHost. I like the extensive cPanel BlueHost provides as well as their live chat support — very helpful. If I were to do it all over, I wouldn’t bother trying to customize my themes so much. Instead, I’d just pay $100 for a nice-looking Premium WordPress theme.

If you have a work/professional blog and a fun blog, how do you differentiate them? Do you hide your real identity on the fun one, so as not to poison any Googling by future prospective employers/customers?

If you’re going to embarrass yourself online, don’t blog. Do yourself and your career a favor and don’t hit that Submit button, hoping no one discovers who you are. But if you want a personal blog to post pictures of your cat and kids, yes, create a second, separate blog. My wife actually uses Dick and Jane pseudonyms, but many just use their real names. If you go the self-hosting route, you can install two blogs on the same web host space. Personally, maintaining two blogs is strenous. I can barely keep up with one.

How do you like to handle audience participation? Don’t allow it? Have the responses on the same “physical”/visual page as your posts? … Do you moderate?

Definitely allow comments without moderation. Moderation connotes distrust. And comments, however short or unclever, motivate me. I’ll admit it — even though I don’t write for comments, I absolutely love getting comments. It means my post has influenced someone in some way. If you turn off comments, you eliminate the comment spam problem, but you also miss out on the interactive fun of the web. Also, some comments enrich and deepen your understanding of what you’re writing about.

As a reader of other people’s blogs, do you even care what anybody (other than the blog author) has to say?

Yes, sometimes the comments on a blog are more interesting than the post itself. You can discover other new blogs through comments.

Do you compose via the service’s web interface, or do you compose off-line and upload?

I write in Word as I ride the train into work, and sometimes at lunchtime or in the evening. Word is easier to compose my thoughts, because I can rearrange and edit more quickly than with the WordPress interface. I also try to alternate long posts with short ones, which helps keep the momentum going without wearing me out.

Is there a good reason to have your own branded website, as opposed to just a blog somewhere … ?

Definitely get your own domain. It only costs $10. Even if you use a hosted site, you can buy a domain and point it there. Personal domains are more professional looking and unique.

What about visibility? Are the techniques similar to those for websites, when it comes to getting noticed by search engines and serendipity?

Blogs are very visible. The more readers you have, the more your SEO climbs, and the more hits you get from Google. If you start writing about products and services, people read them and often believe you more than the company websites. To crank up your visibility, write interesting content, comment on a lot of other posts, post at least three times a week, and be patient.

What happens when you want to move? Do you own your content (and any responses you’ve received)? Is there an easy, practical way to port them to a new provider … ?

WordPress allows you to export your content and upload it to another site. Very convenient. If you blog for a company and then switch jobs, you’ve lost quite a bit of content and Google rank.

Any other gotchas and tips?

Ask yourself if you’re truly a writer, because blogging is writing. If you’re a good writer and enjoy writing, you’ll love the creative outlet of the blog. If you’re more of a techie who happens to be able to write software manuals during the day, you may find writing posts a chore rather than a relaxation. However, given such a bent, WordPress provides a playland of code to explore.

Is there a newer approach than blogs, that I should be considering … ?

I keep waiting for another podcaster in the tech comm field to emerge, or a screencaster. I think Jing will make a strong impact on the blogosphere when it catches on. What is Web 3.0? Invisibly connected networks of sharing without effort? I’m not sure.

When you do start your blog, please send me a link. Also see my blogroll for other good blogs on technical communication.