Marketing Roadmaps

the one about badges and integrity

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Eventually, I will share my thoughts on BlogHer ’09 and report on a terrific breakfast meeting I had during BlogHer with Beth Smits and Erin Bix of Best Buy to learn more about Best Buy’s Women’s Leadership Forum (WOLF).

Today, though I want to talk a little bit more about badges and integrity. As I’ve written before, you don’t need a badge to blog with integrity, and if you don’t have integrity, slapping a badge up on your blog isn’t going to magically give it to you.  Integrity is a deeply personal thing, and in the context of blogging, a matter between a writer and her readers.

Blog with Integrity, the initiative I co-created with fellow bloggers Liz Gumbinner, Kristen Chase and Julie Marsh, is simply a public statement about how we intend to behave as bloggers.  It’s not prescriptive nor does it attempt to classify blogs by content or policies. It’s a simple code of conduct based on fairly universal principles – respect for others, responsibility for one’s words and deeds, and disclosure of our interests. If bloggers want to display their support of these principles, they can sign the pledge and/or display a badge.

Just as some folks like to display their support for causes and political candidates by wearing buttons and putting bumper stickers on their cars and others do not, some bloggers like badges and others do not. All we can say for certain is that the person wearing the button or the blog displaying the badge supports the cause. It is incorrect to conclude that the absence of same indicates lack of support. Or in the case of Blog with Integrity, a lack of integrity.

Some people don’t like badges. Don’t read more into it.

Is the badge a nice cue about the blog and the blogger? Sure, but it’s not enough, and we never intended it to be viewed as such.

Make your judgment about a blog based on everything presented to you as a reader, not just on whether it displays a badge, and please don’t assume that a blog without the Blog with Integrity badge is somehow “less” than a blog with it.

Such an assumption is in direct conflict with a core principle of Blog with Integrity: there is no one right way to blog.

That includes our own.

Reader Interactions

Comments

  3. Susan,
    Though its sad you had to clarify, thank you for doing so. I’m all on board for the blogging with integrity principles. I think that stating the same is absolutely necessary for me. I fully espouse all of the principles behind the badge, I am one who just hates those 125×125 badges. Its a thing I guess. None the less, thanks again!

    And thanks to the great ladies who brought the idea to life.
    .-= deb@birdonawire´s last blog ..Thinking INSIDE The Box =-.

  4. I wish we didn’t have to have this entire conversation. This makes me wonder about the next fallout. The “that person has a BWI badge but isn’t blogging with integrity” fallout. (OMG NO WAY! Let’s all post about it!!!Let’s discuss it to DEATH!!! I’m sure it’s happening already.)

    When I started blogging in late 2003, (late to the game by some standards, early by others) I could never imagine a day like this would come. A day where we needed this kind of movement. (At the time, I actually never imagined ads on blogs or companies handing out free stuff to bloggers, but here we.) It makes me feel a little sad. I definitely support blogging with integrity (and all that goes with it, like disclosure and transparency), I just have a problem with the “us v. them” vibe I’ve been feeling lately. I’ve given it lots of thought, workshopping the issue on my own blog, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it just plain makes me uncomfortable. Beyond that, I don’t know. There is still lots to think and write about…
    .-= Stefania/CityMama´s last blog ..Honolulu Summer 2009: Part II [Random shit on trays at my mom’s house] =-.

  5. I too wish I hadn’t felt the need to write this post, but was increasingly disturbed by the blog posts and twitter comments introducing this idea in the guise of criticism — constructive and otherwise.

    By all means, disagree with the idea, decide BWI is not for you. That’s fair, and we never expected 100% worldwide adoption. As I said above, pledges and badges aren’t for everyone. Fair enough. But some posters out and out said that the Blog with Integrity badge implied such a good/bad distinction.

    It does not. By design. We deliberately did not describe different policies or prescribe a certain ethical code. That’s your business, not ours. Classification systems nearly always (d)evolve into ranking and hierarchies. Anyone who reads this blog for more than a month knows how much I personally dislike ranking systems 🙂

    We hoped — and still hope — that Blog with Integrity can bring us back to a place where it is just us. No them to be versus, because we recognize that there’s room on the playground for everyone.

  6. One of my blogs has the badge.

    The other doesn’t.

    I’d hope that settles the notion of some sort of us v them class system…

    but it won’t. Because people like to argue.
    .-= Mom101´s last blog ..Daddy. My own. =-.