Last week we picked up on a conversation that was unfolding at Dell’s B2B event about the ethics of ghostwriting a company blog. It’s an emotive subject and was always going be one that divided opinion. But much like the recent debate about paying bloggers for coverage, the results may surprise some people.

After seven days of voting, the poll showed that those that thought it was a good idea outweighed those that didn’t by 52% to 48%, showing that the majority of people felt that this was a perfectly acceptable way to run a blog.

With so much talk of transparency and openness being key to succeeding in the digital space, why has the poll ended up showing that the majority of voters (albeit by a small margin) think that ghostwriting is fair game?

As expected, the hardcore social media bods steadfastly came down on the side of ‘bad’. Simon Collister from We Are Social raised legality issues, referencing his post on the CIPR’s social media guidelines (which specifically say that “members should be aware that ‘ghosting’ a blog is illegal”, though Collister believes this is a zealous interpretation of the fair trading EU directive) and questioning the core role of a PR person. “The argument will go that PR types ghost copy all the time, for client by-lined articles; CEO quotes for press releases; speech etc. But this isn’t an excuse – we need to stop ghosting this stuff as well. Ghosting was always wrong, but tolerated.”

That was indeed the case, as Paul Allen from Ruder Finn said that though ghost-blogging is obviously not best practice, the idea that it is ‘wrong’ to do so just doesn’t make sense.
“I’m not sure I agree that the ghosting of other materials – speeches, presentations, quotes etc – is wrong either. CEOs/MDs are busy running businesses and employ internal and external communications professionals to amongst other things, write copy and draft speeches.”

Many of the comments from PR professionals centred around the definition of what ghostwriting actually means, as Danny Whatmough from Wildfire asked.  “In a perfect world, all businesses, brands and CEOs that blogged would write it all themselves. In reality it’s not always possible or practical. Does this mean they shouldn’t blog? There are a lot of ‘rules’ that get bandied around in relation to social media, often from very high horses.”

Benjamin Ellis raised the fact that this could be another ‘traditional PR’ vs. ‘digital native’ issue, but also pointed out that it’s not always easy to get people to write for themselves “Lots of mature businesses are stuck with “can’t blog won’t blog” senior execs – the temptation for PR folks to ghost blog for them is almost irresistible. That doesn’t make it right of course. The biggest downfall is when the CEO meets a customer and the customer starts to talk to them about what they said in the blog post – big #fail / embarrassment, or if a customer posts a comment and someone else responds as the CEO #biggerfail.”

In-house marketer Owain Betts made a final point about the primary purpose of a corporate blog being about interacting with clients, and a secondary goal is generating leads and ultimately sales. “A lot of businesses still don’t get blogs and see them solely as a sales channel (telling the audience, rather than talking with them) and so unless they have some marketing/PR experience, they need support to guide them through this maze.
That’s not saying someone has to write it for them. But there needs to be some hand-holding for those that think it’s a quick win when it could quite easily become a big loss.”

Neville Hobson from WeissComm has previously blogged his thoughts on the issue, and took a less dismissive approach than some of his peers. Hobson believes that though there’s nothing inherently wrong with ghost-blogging if you disclose the fact that you’re doing so – you’re not really embracing the real benefits of having a blog in the first place and engaging with your audience. This really is the crux of the argument, as none of the comments on the side of ‘yes, this is a good idea’ are really that clean cut, and are filled with caveats.

There seems to be three schools of thought here. The digital specialist that views a ghostwritten blog as a travesty, the agency that agrees with those specialists in theory, but defends its actions in light of the fact that ghostwriting in other guises is seen as acceptable. And finally, the in-house operative that takes a more measured approach, sitting somewhere in between and asks why the ability of those expected to write the blog is not taken into consideration.

There’s no conclusion to this debate, but it does draw attention to how blurry the lines of what is and isn’t acceptable online. Though ‘being human’ is what we’d all like to see from brands, sometimes we all forget that it’s not always that black and white.