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A few months ago we got the most offensive legal advertising ever taken down. (Remember,  it advertised a sex offender defense practice using a photo of a girl showing skin and looking guilty….and an adult hand keeping a scared child from speaking.)

As the father of two girls who have never watched television, I’m astounded by the messages lots of family accept as normative “becuase” they are on “insert the network name of your choice.”  We we on Yahoo! Kids, which provides select games for kids age six through twelve. and came across a game called “Dress Up the Cheerleader” which is infact trains girls to dress to please others….and the others who matter want them semi-nude.

Girls, Please a Crowd of Boys to Win!

Set up: A crowd of boys watches a dress a girl from the underwear up. The “Crowd-o-Meter” registers their full approval of her in underwear. As she dresses ,their approval wains. However, fixing up her hair, and selecting more revealing clothing can regain their approval.

The challenge: Will your girl tramp herself up enough to make the boys happy and win.

The choice: your character can end up smiling and happy if she gets the crowds approval.  However, dressing her in long pants and not fixing her hair results in a low score and a very sad face.

Three Simlple Messages for Girls:

1. An audience of boys will judge you.
2. Victory is external, so follow social signals carefully.
3. You can win if you fit the box boys want you in. (and that box requires showing skin.)

Stupid or reprehensible?

The game’s developer is  MiniMe Media, who can be contacted via <charles.lee@minimemedia.com>. However, its more likely that linking to this description and expressing concern about Yahoo! Kids wil get a better result.

Last week a family member had serious enough surgery that I took time away from my job to be a caregiver. Surprisingly, this has connected me more to social networks and this blog. You see,  our hospital has wi-fi in its waiting areas, so writing online is productive way to pass time, and absorb the waiting with grace. When I wake up at night to give medication, the online community is there and I appreciate it. I’m finishing this in a waiting room now.

Research shows that more than three in ten U.S. households (31.2%) report that at least one person has served as an unpaid family caregiver within the last twelve months, leading to an estimate of 36.5 million households with a caregiver present. My own experience illustrates what sociologists have told us about caregiving for decades: caregiving is a social role that needs to be balanced.

You see, once someone in the family is the identified patient, their caretakers become reluctant to receive care or to be patients themselves. Many caretakers have untreated medical issues, preventative health needs, or just a chronic need for relief.  When your job is to be the one who helps, it’s easy to skip self-care.

Community Beats Isolation: It Keeps Drama in Check
Fortunately for me, our friends are instinctively hip to this. Our kids have had lots of play dates, church friends have dropped off some meals, and our extended family made all that hospital waiting-room time possible.  Which brings me to introducing this free online workspace for caregivers and their friends, Lotsa Helping Hands.

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This response was originally posted on Shava Nerad’s blog Memesplice. It is used with permission.

This is a response to Ja-Nae Duane’s article, which in turn responds to Dave Weineke’s article, both on UsefulArts.us, Dave’s blog.

You should go read both.  But briefly, Dave thinks a blog article written by one person and posted under another name is a violation of ethics.  Ja-Nae, speaking as a client, begs to differ.

Let me, as a professional, explain why Ja-Nae is not only justified, but supported by a long history that should be admired and respected.

Those of you who know me in person probably know I come off better in print than I often do in public.  I’m not a stylish dresser.  I’m a bit geekish, and when I am not on a podium, my speech is overly-mannered and too fast.

But I can write.  And I have a terrific ear.

I have ghost written a blog for a Harvard professor and have ghost written speeches for a major figure in philanthropy and a number of politicians.  I have written articles for CEOS and professors that were placed in major publications, and ghosted an article by a major magazine editor when he was asked to write a guest column for Newsweek.

My name not on those works.  Not only that, but in many cases, I am contractually or otherwise professionally obligated not to list those works on my resume or mention the clients by name.

But I have to say, I was paid well by most of them (some of the political work was volunteer).

Is it ethical to publish an article solely in our client’s name?  It always has been.  We might be listed as staff on a publication, or a roster.  The thoughts we write are not, technically, our own.  We don’t really do much more than a radio journalist does when interviewing a public figure, cutting small talk, removing the um’s and ah’s, and re-recording and restating questions to better fit the time allotted for a story.  Oh, wait — you mean you didn’t know they did that either?

Even when ghosting is transparent, it has been quickly forgotten or overlooked by the public in the past.  Every American history reader knows President Kennedy said, “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country!”

But Kennedy only *said* those words, which are attributed to him in every reference work of quotations in the world.  A genius speech writer, Ted Sorenson, wrote those words for him.

Sorenson, an intelligent, intellectual, modest man, did what he did out of purpose and love, with a finely honed sense of language — and an intimate understanding of the man he worked for.

His words carried Kennedy’s authentic voice around the world.

The job of a ghost or speech writer is to get so far inside the mind and skin of her/his client that you are no more “faking” the person’s words, than a hairdresser is “faking” the person’s hair. Ideally, a professional makes the expression of style a natural extension of the individual. The client runs a comb through, and every word falls in place as though it grew that way.

Sometimes, the “fix” is obvious.  Did anyone think Sarah Palin solo’d her book?  Authenticity is transparent with or without a ghost (Lynn Vincent, senior writer for the Christian publication World Magazine).  The Christian Science Monitor estimates that 90% of politicians’ books are ghosted, Obama’s being a notable recent exception.

Some of us do this better than others.  We have, in the parlance of social media, been “delivering authenticity” for longer than any media workers.

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Thank you for the opportunity to respond to yesterday’s post, The Ethics of Ghost Writing and Marionette Social Media.

As someone who does a tremendous amount of outsourcing, this is a topic that is near and dear to me.

Blogging:
I am a huge advocate of outsourcing my blog writing. Why?

Well, I have two reasons:

• Time: I am an idea person. I think of more blog posts that I can actually write. It sometimes inhibits my ability to even outline a blog post. With that being said, it is much easier to create a topic and a few key points that I want highlighted and then hand it over to someone I trust with “my voice” and who can deliver it to me in a timely fashion.
• Trust: Tina and I have been working together for a while now. She gets who I am, what I am trying to say, and how I want to say it. She was the one who took my notes, outline, and previous articles and assembled my new book, “How to Start Your Business with $100”

Because she and I worked so closely on something so personal, it was an easy switch for her to start writing my blog posts for my blog as well.

Social Media:
This is an area where I change my tune.

SM interactions have to be personal. Sure, you can have someone scan news and articles for you, but at the end of the day, only YOU know how you would respond to a comment or how you would engage an individual.

As a social media strategist, my team and I have had to take on personas more frequently than I would care to share. I make the recommendation to have us teach the individual how easy it is to engage in the social sphere, however, many people still feel that social media is overwhelming and refuse to touch it.

On the flip side of that, how would you feel if you were corresponding with someone who was not really that individual? Would you feel cheated? Would you care?

My experience is that people absolutely care. They want to know that they are reaching that individual and not a member of their staff. It completely changes people’s perception of that individual.

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The road to hell isn’t just paved with good intentions. Its slope is masked by perfectly plausible justifications.

So here’s the nice, clear thesis this post will advance:

Unacknowledged ghost authorship of social media is unethical if you put your name on it.

Many errors seem benign in the beginning. But no matter how gradual its onset, the practice is wrong, unethical, and a threat to reputation and business.

The Slippery Slope
Personal conventions and ethics are still catching up to the “Brand You” world we live in.

Social media is a good way to extend your brand. So, first comes the blogging. That’s essentially a magazine, and publications outsource their writing all the time. So after a while trust, authenticity, and transparency become just production values in the service of gaining subscribers and brand awareness.

And once you have a ghostwritten blog, it’s a small step to ghost Twitter updates. Again, there are justifications (did you think Obama did all his own campaign Twittering?).

But the whole point of social media is to have a two way relationship. So these channels generate comments and replies, and then other blogs and Twitter feeds comment on them.  The next step is outsourcing these interactions — and that’s how brands can end up with a social media house of cards.

The Truth is Simple
A byline is a statement of fact; it identifies the author of a piece of writing. Therefore, it must be accurate.

Kanye West’s blog, which kept publishing posts even after he was jailed, exposed a factual lie. Hugh Jackman’s Twitter feed, ironically called The Real Hugh Jackman, was embarrassingly shown to be written by staff. Outsourcing social media is okay; lying about it is an error.

The problem in both these examples isn’t that the celebrities were exposed for not writing the entries personally.  It is that they were making a factual claim that was false.

Less Conflict of Interest, More Feigning of Interest
Guy Kawasaki gracefully disclosed his use of three ghostwriters on his Twitter account.  Having been a proponent of social media and transparency, some of his readers found his outsourcing hypocritical.  One reader said he was complimented that Kawasaki had taken the time to read and comment on his blog. Now he has cause to question whether that was a faux-personal touch.

Like Martha Stewart, who advocates a lifestyle that isn’t sustainable by a single human, Guy Kawasaki is also an evangelist.  His use of technology and social media is core to his brand.  As he noted in his defense of outsourcing part of his Twittering:

“Basically, for 99.9 percent of people on Twitter, it is about updating friends and colleagues about how the cat rolled over,” he said. “For a tenth of a percent it is a marketing tool.”

Compare Guy Kawasaki to Charlie Baker
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The parking lot next to my daughter’s daycare warns, “You are under constant video surveillance.”  I don’t think they mean that in the universal sense, but the increasing use of mobile devices, smart cards,  and databases draws the reality of constant surveillance closer.

As technologies start to share information, location privacy has the potential to become a thematic concern.

Location Tracking Can Be Both Really Useful and Really Creepy
Fee-based services make it easy to turn a conventional cell phone into a tracking device. Simply install software, and you can monitor and record your child’s or employees’ every move, and even their speed.  In an effort to improve school attendance, some judges are ordering truants to carry GPS trackers, and there’s a service to track and assist Alzheimers patients. Apparently, some people even want a GPS in their skivvies.

Being able to find people fast would be a boon to law enforcement. Police in Ohio used GPS to find the thief who robbed someone’s cash and GPS-equipped cell phone. Churches are using a free GPS service to protect nativity scenes from pilfering. (This also means there’s now a way to keep track of those wayward garden gnomes without waiting for postcards.)

Last year we wrote about a law that requires your car’s tires to report what they’re up to. And the Wild West nature of location tracking just keep increasing.

A GPS Beacon in Every Pocket
The government-mandated addition of GPS tracking to cellphones, and their increasing ubiquity, introduces the prospect of after-the-fact and real-time tracking of a person’s every move. (Remember the old Camelot song “I Wonder What the King is Doing Tonight”?  Perhaps we should selectively apply this kind of tracking to elected representatives. I’m just sayin’.)

Massachusetts currently uses GPS cell phones to track snowplows.  Insurance companies have proposed providing variable billing for the actual number of miles a vehicle travels.  Same with vehicle taxation. Of course, such monitoring could also allow insurance firms to raise rates of vehicles that speed, or authorities to issue citations based on such speed data.

There are many ways to record location: IP address, smart card use, surveillance cameras. Then there’s my favorite, the video-equipped parking department vehicles that record where every car parked on the street spends the night. Even my city has a good idea of who is where each night.

Early Steps Towards Government Mass Surveillance by GPS
Blogger Christopher Soghoian  raised eyebrows with a recording of a Sprint executive at a conference exploring how Sprint provided a portal to give user GPS data to law enforcement agents “8 million times” over a 13-month span.

While serving as a U.S. attorney during the Bush administration, Christopher Christie tracked the whereabouts of citizens through their cell phones without warrants. The ACLU obtained documents detailing the spying program from the Justice Department in an ongoing lawsuit over cell phone tracking.

Does State Tracking of Innocent Citizens Constitute a Search?
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Last week I asked UsefulArts.us readers what they think may online law trends for  2010.  Here’s the first of what looks like a half dozen responses to that question.

The Coulrophobia Epidemic of 2010: trademark owners’ fear of clowns may be rational.
When a competitor uses your mark and pretends to be your company, that’s infringement. But when a clown mocks you with your own mark, that’s parody. And it may well be protected speech. And in an age of Twitter and viral video, mocking can be more deleterious than infringement.

Consider this fake press conference, at which an impostor U.S. Chamber of  Commerce announced its (not real) change in policy to support combating global warming. When the real Chamber shows up, it turns into an episode of The Office, which the clowns play to the Chamber’s regret.

From the above escapade, the Chamber filed a claim of trademark infringement and used a take-down notice to force the pranksters’ ISP to discontinue a parody website that supported the hoax. Was there a “likelihood of confusion”? Absolutely. And it was also classic parody speech.

Similar trademark claims have been made against NYTimes.se, which mocked The New York Times and corporations like DeBeers. We recently noticed The South Butt, a clothing line which mocks The North Face. And, only a few days ago, environmental activist Brian DeSmet received a complaint for mocking Peabody Energy.

In a world where Ashton Kutcher is considered a brand, a fear of clowns may be a viable business survival strategy.

Regulation of digital marketing heats up. States try it too.
I suppose the fear of regulators is a variation of the fear of clowns.

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I don’t need to tell you, its a tough time to be a young lawyer. This dark send-up of lawyer advertising suggests that the economy may bring our best and brightest to promote themselves using desperate measures.  This sketch is from Almost Live a local comedy show based in Seattle. As you can imagine, Aurora Avenue has the reputation you might expect from the skit.

In the near feature we’ll focus more on real advertising, such as this  criminally bad defense lawyer advertising, and my  unfortunately growing collection of bad ads from airports.

An annual survey of marketing professionals indicates that the share of budget devoted to content creation will be 33 percent in 2010, triple the 11 percent the same survey projected in 2009.

Marketing spend is migrating online, and strong content is now “table stakes” for success in online marketing.  Online what we say defines who we are.

That’s why small firms reported investing twice the budget share on content as larger firms (a total of 40%). Content marketing is a chance for these firms to brand themselves while also acquiring prospects.

The chart below shows the much increased emphasis on mobile marketing, and the arrival of article marketing as a content and SEO tactic. You can count on more thinking on content strategy and its legal implications here on UsefulArts. (register for email updates).