…and I don’t think it’s arrogant to say, “I don’t believe in God” unless it’s arrogant to say, “I believe cigarettes are bad for you.”

I understood that you were expressing your feelings (feelings of being deceived, for example), but you were also expressing an ethos – a prescriptive standard of behavior – which I thought included some judgment.

I don’t think I defined “fake” but I really only consider blogs fake when they are completely feed-driven and apparently run by robots. If CEO John Doe has a blog called “CEO John Doe’s Blog,” and CEO John Doe has some involvement with it and approves what is posted on it, I would not consider it fake. The thing is that when I read a blog I never think about whether or not it was written or edited or proofread by the by-lined author (for the blogs I read, I usually don’t recognize the name anyway). By the same token, whenever I read anything “written” by a CEO of a company of any size I assume that someone else either wrote it or helped write it. This isn’t merely cynicism. If someone is speaking as CEO they are, to a certain extent, speaking as a corporate function, not just a person. I expect them to have support in carrying out that function.

Now if CEO John Doe had a personal blog where he mainly wrote about golf, fly fishing, and his hometown and he paid someone else to write it for him, I would think that was a little weird but I’m not really sure I would care. If I had gotten emotionally involved in what he was saying and thought we were really connecting through comments or whatever and then it turned out I was interacting with a surrogate the whole time, it would be a drag, I admit

Finally: evangelism. I appreciate your evangelical streak as well, but mainly when its on the upswing – “Isn’t this cool! This changes everything!” – and not so much when the underlying message seems to be, “If you aren’t being awesome, you suck. Why do you decide to suck instead of be awesome?” Godin kind of does the same thing and, frankly, audiences seem to respond so maybe I’m just overly sensitive. To me the rhetoric of realizing your potential and “being all you can be” reflects a capitalist urge to exploit things to the point of exhaustion and extinction. I think it can be healthy to leave some potential unrealized, in other words. But that’s just me.

At the same time, the problem I brought up at the end of my post is reflected in your final words “these channels can re-invigorate marketing.” I’m an old hippy and have never been able to shake the feeling that business-stuff is always already coopted, manipulative, and “inauthentic.” If the best thing that comes of social media is an improvement of marketing effectiveness, then social media is just another part of the bummer, man.

In my own experience, the social media have been the most rewarding when they facilitated personal connections that really had nothing to do with money (I include this interaction in that category).

I find that very confusing.

Throughout the entire post, my comment was – continually – that my thoughts on ghost blogging were an opinion/feeling – not a hard and fast rule. It was how something (in this case, ghost blogging) makes me feel.

I also don’t understand your definition of “fake” here. If someone’s name is on a Blog and they are not the person writing it, that seems pretty fake to me at the most basic level.

Lastly, I love my evangelical streak. I like dreaming and dreaming with others because I do think that these channels can re-invigorate marketing.

As far as questions 1 and 2 are concerned, I guess it depends on what you mean by “writing.” Is this really about the physical act of typing? I thought we were talking about authorship, which involves both the organization of language and ideas and publicly taking ownership of them.

As far as question 3 goes, I don’t believe that analogy is apt at all. But if ghost bloggers give people fake names and ideas to pass off as their own, maybe I’m not a ghost blogger after all. That’s just not how it goes down with my clients.

My real beef, and its not just with you, sir, concerns the “authenticity imperative” that seems to prevail in the discourse around social media. Most people who invoke “authenticity” as a value, usually one that will help differentiate you in the marketplace of ideas, don’t seem to have thought the concept through or realize that “authentic” utterances themselves have been carefully, albeit sometimes unconsciously, crafted out of all the things a person could possibly say. Nothing we say is pure, uncut, genuine. There’s always something else behind it.

The same is true, I believe, of “openness,” “transparency,” and “honesty.” Verily these are ideals because they do not exist in human society in unadulterated form.

Perhaps, though, I am the real moralist, because I do not believe anyone is justified in pointing out the fakery of others. Thus when you or Avinash or anyone else start holding people to a particular moral standard: “A blog is THIS. Writing blogs should happen in THIS way. If you do it THAT way you are doing something wrong.” – it rankles.

You do have an evangelical streak in you, Mitch Joel, and every time I’ve seen you speak I think it’s the one element that’s rubbed me the wrong way. This may be why I was compelled to respond to your post in the way I did. I think your stuff is strong when you are saying, “This is a cool way to do things.” Less so when you say, “If this is what you’re doing, you suck.”

The one part that struck me though was this: “Rightly or wrongly, I actually believe that the people whose bloggings I facilitate are the ‘actual’ authors of the posts that I produce. The ideas are theirs, the ‘voice’ is theirs, the blog is theirs, etc.”

Regardless of my moral stance or the ideals I shared (and how you feel about them), I’m grappling with a few questions:

1. If it’s theirs, why are you writing it?
2. If you are writing it, why not say you wrote it?
3. How would you feel if after a dinner, I turned to you and said, “BTW, the name I gave you? That’s not me. Oh, and the topics we discussed? Not mine. Someone gave them to me.” Do those encounters usually end up producing the best relationships?

When I was growing up, if someone asked me my religion, I used to say I was a Methodist because that’s what I was. It was as automatic as saying, “I’m American.” There was no particular pride or any feeling associated with it. It was just a fact.

Being an atheist, for some reason, can’t just be a fact; it has to be a statement.