Disclosures can be tough when you’re at an agency. Especially if you don’t blog about your work that much but you blog about industries your clients have a stake in.
I blog about marketing, technology, journalism, mobile, business models, startups, and any related trends or anything I find mildly interesting. I blog about those things on New Comm Biz and my Tac Anderson lifestream and share links on Twitter and bookmark, highlight and annotate thing on Diigo and all those aggregate to my FriendFeed.
How do you disclose any potential conflict across all those channels? It’s impossible really. It was easy when I worked at HP. I just said I worked at HP and that covered it. But at an agency where I work with dozens of technology clients and several more that we represent that I don’t work with regularly how do you cover it all?
I have a disclosure on my main blog and state that I work for Waggener Edstrom on most of my bio’s but if you aren’t in the industry there’s a really good chance you don’t know who Waggener Edstrom is. Even if you do know who we are you may not realize all the clients we work for (and that’s not even a full list).
The short answer is:
If it’s even vaguely technology related I represent someone who has an interest in that field.
And in many cases we represent several clients with a vested interest. Should I create a full page of all potential conflicts work related or otherwise? Should I disclose personal biases? Maybe I just don’t like some companies. Or had a bad experience with a product. I have good friends that work at certain companies, should I disclose those as well. What about services that I use and like, should I disclose those?
Or is stating my employer and trusting that if people really want to know they can go look? I think what I will do is add the above,” if it’s technology related” line to my bio where I can.
What about you? How do you deal with all the potential perceived or real conflicts of interest?
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