One of the things that I try to keep telling people – especially those who are utterly dismissive of traditional media – is that there are significant differences between traditional and non-traditional journalists.

Traditional journalists tend to have a ‘code of behaviour’ Sure they aren’t carved in stone and there will be as many interpretations as there are people, and as an agency person I’ve come to understand how that all works.

With the ‘citizen-journalist’ (aka blogger) there are really no rules. As such it means that one has to be that much more careful when talking to a blogger – and that hamstringing of open-ness goes against the very nature of blogging… nice catch 22, isn’t it?

This isn’t to say that one situation is better than the other, but rather, that the two can be and often are different enough that different engagement strategies need to be employed.

Ultimately, blogger or journalist it really comes down to the same thing… building meaningful, trustworthy connections and relationships.

Mark

As an analyst, I’m fairly cautious about directly quoting vendor execs when we’ve spoken outside of a formal context (e.g. public announcement, many briefings). This is somewhat of a judgment call but, even if not actually confidential, I think there are a lot of cases where people don’t expect to see direct, attributed quotes in print.

However, I think that asking someone to keep info “off the record,” expecting certain things to be kept off the record, and info that we put on social networking profiles or our own blogs to not bite us are different issues.

If we are putting info on a social networking profile, that info is, technically, in the public domain. Therefore, we have to watch what we say about ourselves, if we are interested in cultivating a “personal brand” or even keeping our public persona on the up and up.

Which is a good thing to do! In the U.S., there have been no test cases of potential employees suing employers over being denied employment because of their social networking profiles (see this post from my blog) but as you note, it’s happening with some regularity these days. We have to be our own judges of what’s off or on the record.

However, when you’re talking with someone in casual conversation, you should have a sense whether or not you can trust that person. People who write personal blogs have different reasons for writing what someone tells them than someone who writes a more focused, business-related blog–so if you’re talking with a friend who’s a blogger, know what kind of blog they write, and whether or not you might be mentioned (and how you’re mentioned.) If it’s someone who’s writing as an citizen journalist, depending on the conversation, you might need to mention something is “off the record.” Whether it stays off the record, however, is another thing that few in the blogosphere can agree on. There’s no easy solution.

If I engage in an e-mail conversation with a developer of a service I’ll be writing about and ask questions and get answers, I will sometimes excerpt those for a post and cite “said in an e-mail.” I also have quoted from comments on FriendFeed or Twitter, because those are public comments that are attributed.

That said, I have e-mail conversations all the time with other bloggers which I trust will be “off the record”. It’s an issue of knowing who you are talking with, their goals, and whether they are trusted.