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Just when is it right to accept a free gift or money in exchange for an article or review on a website or a blog? Always, in my opinion, so long as you are open about that transaction and don’t dress your article as anything else than a paid piece of prose.

Michael Gray makes a challenge to the ethics of TechCrunch writer, Sarah Lacy, today in his post about the difference of ethics between types of writers; be they bloggers or journalists. Fair enough.

With spin being the staple of successive Governments and also of traditional offline PR, Media and Business it can hardly be that surprising that these same tactics are employed in the online environment. The sad reality is that payola in all of it’s guises is a publishing fixture and is likely to remain such so long as there are hearts, minds and importantly consumer spending habits at stake.

Aside from the potential infringement of numerous country specific regulatory controls regards honesty and integrity in communications it may not be immediately appreciated that a lot of good writing talent is forced to tow the line in creating biased copy.

The humble writer can be drawn into a murky world of paid constructions through their need to satisfy the ’style’ guidelines of their employer and even perhaps the ‘brand guidelines’ of a brand that may be sponsoring the writing.

Complicating the matter more in the online world is a lack of consensus from the traffic driving search engines in defining where the lines of bias lay, as they themselves are not always completely transparent about their commercial benefits that they relinquish for bias (of positioning, thinking paid inclusion (Microhoo)).

I have worked with a number of demanding clients over the years and it is often taken for granted that clients understand the implications of actions that they demand in an online world; but they seldom do and nor are they keen on listening. Clients are pressured by what their competitors are doing and a need to be seen by their own executives to be responding.

Considerations such as a penalty being applied by a search engine for flouting a search engines definition of acceptable are measured against the risk of being caught out. This is not anything new, search for “Max Clifford” in your favorite engine to see shocking examples of media and populous manipulation.

I also agree that we are well enough into the era of online to understand that there are certain rules that should be adhered to. I do not think that the determining point on this whole issue are for the search engines alone to release their next iteration of how they each respectively determine if a link is valid or not, paid for or not. The argument is far wider than that and consistency is needed:

• across international law dealing with advertising standards,
• search engine policy applicable to not just links but persuasive text,
• search marketing professional adopting a code of practice, and;
• client organizing groups that are willing to drive change

I beleive that these combined have the power to endeer change to us all. Of course there are more important issues facing us such as plastics in our oceans.