Ghostwritten blogs and a lesson from the Wizard of Oz

Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain! Dorothy and her friends are crushed to discover the Wizard of Oz really is no wizard at all; he’s just a man who’s been hiding behind a curtain pulling levers and making noise. They thought they were talking to a real wizard and getting to discuss what mattered to them with someone whose opinion they valued—but they weren’t. Therein lies the risk in a ghost-written blog. It’s a dilemma Todd Defren draws to light in a great piece titled “In Defense of Ghostblogging: Social Media Ethical Dilemmas.”

But leaders are busy leading and they’re not writers or they’d be doing my job instead. So I’ve ghostwritten emails, newsletters articles, and more for many years. In fact, one membership invitation I wrote received so many compliments that the leader I wrote it for was grateful when the kickoff event was over. The reason: it wore him out to pretend he wrote it. The piece worked, though, because I knew the leader so well that I could write in his voice. I knew what he would want to say and how he would say it. The piece, in essence, was from him even if it wasn’t written by him. Most important of all is that he requested the topic and he personally edited and approved the final copy.

Blogs get grayer because they live somewhere in the world of “Dear Diary” and talking over the fence or water cooler. In other words, they’re a conversation specifically between the author and the readers. They work specifically because they’re not corporate-speak from corporate writers like me. If readers figure out—or come to believe—it isn’t really the listed author doing the writing then the trust is gone.

Does that mean I think you should never ghostwrite a blog? No. It’s an awfully slippery slope, though, as soon as it shifts from editing to drafting to writing. The further it moves in the other direction, the more the Wizard of Oz becomes just the man behind the curtain. Dorothy and her friends may not have been able to walk out and “hire” a new wizard, but customers and potential customers can “walk out” on a business. Once they walk out, they almost never come back. To me it’s not worth the risk...