I thought I’d share my response to an interesting question raised by Ted Murphy of IZEA. Ted runs an advertising network that deals primarily in “sponsored conversations.” The idea is that they match brands with bloggers who want to write about them. Money is exchanged, which raises the hackles of the blogopshere.

The question at issue wasn’t about that though. Ted is also a firm believer in disclosure for anyone who accepts payment for their opinion, and he posed the following –

Every post done through SocialSpark has standardized machine readable disclosure and automated disclosure audits. You can’t get paid through SocialSpark without having a disclosure badge.

What if all marketers and bloggers played by these same rules? What if we defined disclosure together and enforced it through an independent third party service run by a trade organization? I believe we can. Standardization of our practices through software automation and validation is the ultimate answer. I hope that one of our trade organizations takes the lead to make this happen.

Here’s what I had to say . . .

I think we are all playing in a gray zone and I am, as always, happy that you have decided to meet this charge head on Ted.

Why gray?

People still don’t seem to have a clear definition of what “compensation” means. With SocialSpark/IZEA it’s pretty cut and dry.

Company approaches blogger to write about a product/service.

Blogger accepts/rejects companies offer.

Blogger writes a post, and discloses his relationship with the company.

Company pays blogger for his participation.

For a situation like that, it’s obvious that this type of solution would function. However, let’s change things a bit.

Let’s say that a large tech conference wants to get coverage, so they offer a group of bloggers free passes to the event (something that happens all the time). The bloggers aren’t required to cover the conference, but they mostly will.

What type of disclosure should be required here?

They aren’t being “paid” for their voice necessarily, but they are being compensated for it. I can see a -lot- of people balking at the idea that a free conference pass is the same kind of thing as being paid $100 to review a Mino. Even though when you scrape away the layers, it is.

As a blogger, I believe that any time it could be construed that you would have a bias, you should mention the source of that bias. We make a lot of hard decisions around the type of advertising to accept and the only way to give credence to those decisions and your audience for accepting them is to clearly disclose.

I do worry that something like this will primarily serve to “punish” people who do disclose, as those who don’t care to will skirt around it while those who do will be branded.

My 3 1/2 cents.

What do you think?