Full Disclosure
If you publish content (whatever that may be) about the industry you work in, I think you have an ethical obligation to disclose any potential conflicts.
It is not practical to disclose conflicts of interest in every tweet, blog post, location check in and Facebook status update. You’re going to miss something sometime. So I highly recommend that you build a disclosures page.
With the FTC rules yet to be clarified it’s better to be safe that sorry. The FTC guidelines will require case law to determine what they actually mean and trust me you don’t want to be the case.
This is a really simple fix:
- Create one about page for all your disclosures. It doesn’t have to just be disclosures, it can be one all inclusive “about” page.
- Link to that page from all of your accounts.
Because I have so many places I publish to I wrote a post on my Posterous site www.tacanderson.com/tac-anderson. On this page I link to all my blogs, my employer and a separate more detailed disclosures page. I now link to this page from all of my profile pages (I’m sure there are a few I’ve missed but as I find them I’ll change them).
This is something that most reporters, especially in the business sector, do. Kara Swisher has an Ethics Statement on her WSJ blog
Kara Swisher | BoomTown | AllThingsD
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
From there she links to a page which lists EVERYTHING. She was right that it lists more than you want to know.
What if you don’t have a blog? You could use LinkedIn this way. You could also use a Google Profile page or even a single post to a blog site like Posterous Tumblr or WordPress.
Am I just being paranoid? How are you handling this? Do you have your disclosures posted somewhere? Leave me a link, I’d love to see your approach.
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