I was privileged to present a virtual seminar this week to the Public Relations Society of America. Some interesting questions came into my mailbox after the program was over, so I thought I’d answer them here.

If you’re at the PRSA International Conference in October, be sure to stop by and say hello. I’ll be giving a presentation on Monday, Oct. 22, as well as sharing the stage with PR legend Larry Weber.

Here are the questions and my responses:

Sarah writes:

I am interested in the standards of new media and wanted to ask you specifically about the emergence of advertising on the new media platforms. Are advertisers gaining traction on these sites? I imagine they are. So then…will the new media have a mechanism for separating edit from ads? More fundamentally, how do I trust that the blogger-citizen-writer is free from advertiser influence?

One phenomenon I discuss in my book is the emergence of a rich set of ethical standards in the blogosphere, the kind of standards that any journalistic organization would be proud of. Basically, deception is considered a high crime, and bloggers who have written for hire have been roundly flogged. There are services that pay for coverage, but as a rule, bloggers are expected to disclose these affiliations.

The question of separating ads from editorial is always a moving target, as it has been in print for many years. I believe advertisers and publishers both know that disguising advertising as editorial is bad news. Standards for how ads appear on a page are evolving, but our perceptions will evolve with them. Just as avid newspaper readers instinctively know how to tell an editorial from an advertorial, I expect the same intuitions will develop online.

Jason comments:
While Facebook is exploding beyond [its origins as a service for students], the core users still base their involvement on personal networks. The majority of my Facebook friends are former students I worked with while a PR manager in academia. Integrating these less than professional interactions with fellow PR pros and even clients makes for pins and needles monitoring.

No matter how many identities you might have, Google ruins your chances of complete separation. Unless you resort to pseudonyms for your interactions, the transparent society in which we surf will forever dangle the threat of exposure if you like to keep your person and persona separate.

Can an executive at, say, Ford, share beer jokes with college buddies on his or her MySpace page? Or manage a personal blog about erotic photography while representing Ford on the company blog?

My questions are:

1. Do you see potential pitfalls of people juggling multiple identities in the online world?
2. Where should professionals draw the line in becoming a social networking participant on a personal basis?
3. HR professionals are already Googling potential job candidates. Should your Facebook/MySpace/etc., profiles be off-limits and how can they be if the information is there and free? 4. How long will it take for the Supreme Court to have to decide what a person’s online world means in terms of their employment?
4. How long will it take for the Supreme Court to have to decide what a person’s online world means in terms of their employment?

Your questions imply that people should expect protection over what they say in a public forum beyond those already afforded by the Constitution. I fundamentally disagree with that. The public Internet is every bit as much a public space as Times Square, the exceptions being that one’s indiscretions on the Internet may potentially be seen by many more people and may also be easily searched, copied and stored. It’s no secret that the Internet is a public resource or that public websites are, well, public. I think it’s foolhardy to assume that what you say on the Internet is private.

This puts a greater burden on the individual to be aware of the risks of their behavior and to be discreet. Personally, I would never say anything on a public website that I wouldn’t want published in a newspaper. But the burden is with individual, not with those who witness a person’s behavior. If you want privacy, pick up the phone, use an anonymous e-mail server or encrypt your messages. But don’t expect the courts to come to your rescue. Ignorance of the law is not an excuse for breaking the law, and failing to understand the obvious risks of speaking in a public place should not be an excuse for doing something stupid.

Cindy asks:
When I returned to the office, I immediately tried to go onto Technorati and search for bloggers in the mortgage technology arena, where many of my clients are focused. I found many mentions of mortgage and technology but could not figure out if [the authors] were influential or if they focused in the industry. Is there a better way to go about finding these bloggers? I think I may be too old for this stuff.

I doubt you’re too old, Cindy! It’s more a matter of the search tools being different in this world. I’ll preface my response by saying that all search tools are imperfect. You should use these resources only to give you a general idea of a blogger’s influence.

When you look at the search results in Technorati, you’ll notice a small green label that says “Authority.” This is a ranking that Technorati uses to distinguish the popularity of bloggers. The higher that number, the more links to the bloggers site and, supposedly, the greater the person’s authority. Click on the name of a blogger to see a more complete profile of that person, including his or her ranking among all the blogs that Technorati tracks.

Blogpulse is another site to look at. You can search on a term and then click the “view blog profile” link on the right to learn more about the author. Blogpulse’s database is smaller than Technorati’s, but it has some interesting and unique features.

Here are a couple
of Google tricks. When you type a search term, look at the URLs of the sites in the results. You can often tell by the domain name whether a site is owned by an individual or a business. If a site looks interesting, type “site:sitename.com” into Google to get a list of sites that link to that one. The more links there are, the more popular the site.

You can also use the “site:” operator to find all mentions of a particular search term on a site. So typing “social media site:paulgillin.com” will return a list of all articles on paulgillin.com that mention social media. This is a good way to find out how much a blogger refers to a topic.