I have been blog­ging since May 2001 and have been writ­ing about com­pa­nies and indus­tries for much longer. The fol­low­ing dis­clo­sure state­ment pre­dates the Fed­eral Trade Commission’s require­ment that blog­gers dis­close their asso­ci­a­tions when writ­ing about com­pa­nies or orga­ni­za­tions they have some asso­ci­a­tion with.

I am a social media con­sul­tant, new media strate­gist, author, blog­ger, inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ist, tech entre­pre­neur, speaker and trainer — and move fre­quently from one role to another in the course of a project or in the span of a few hours. I try to be fair and open-minded in my writ­ings, and I believe that trans­parency — let­ting users make their own deci­sion about per­ceived con­flicts — serves us well as the abid­ing prin­ci­ple of the blogosphere.

Pro­fes­sional asso­ci­a­tions and advi­sory roles

First, here is a list of the com­pa­nies and asso­ci­a­tions that I help advise or have been involved with in a pro­fes­sional capac­ity. I am:

• Found­ing mem­ber, Intel Insid­ers social media advi­sory group
• Senior Fel­low, Soci­ety for New Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Research
• Fac­ulty alum­nus, Mac­world Expo
• Advi­sory Board mem­ber of Classwish.org
• Advi­sory Board mem­ber of NetTues­day
• Advi­sory Board mem­ber of The Cen­ter for Cit­i­zen Media
• Advi­sory Board mem­ber of Now­Pub­lic
• Advi­sory Board mem­ber of The Con­ver­sa­tions Net­work and SpokenWord.org
• Advi­sory Board mem­ber of Tech Pol­icy Sum­mit
• Advi­sory Board mem­ber of EDUIT
• Advi­sory Board mem­ber of Rut­gers Jour­nal­ism Resources Insti­tute
• Advi­sory Board mem­ber of LibraryC­ity
• Board mem­ber, Media Blog­gers Asso­ci­a­tion
• Fel­low, Cen­ter for Social Media
• Par­tic­i­pant in three Aspen Insti­tute round­ta­bles
• Par­tic­i­pant, Nokia blog­gers pro­gram
• Found­ing part­ner, Pub­lic Media Col­lab­o­ra­tive
• Co-founder, Social Media Break­fast — East Bay
• Con­trib­u­tor, The Huff­in­g­ton Post

Socialmedia.biz

As prin­ci­pal and orga­nizer of the Socialmedia.biz group of social media con­sul­tants, I have asked my col­leagues to dis­close any rela­tion­ships with the com­pa­nies they write about. In gen­eral, we write about indus­try trends and not about our own work with clients. Here is a list of our clients.

Prod­uct reviews

As a blog­ger and for­mer tech­nol­ogy colum­nist for Engad­get, I occa­sion­ally receive prod­ucts to test out and write about from com­pa­nies such as Kodak, Nokia, Sam­sung and Archos. When I do so, I make efforts to dis­close those rela­tion­ships in my blog entries. As a gen­eral rule, these con­sumer elec­tron­ics gad­gets are on loan for review with no strings attached, and I receive no pay­ment for such write-ups.

Finan­cial ties

With the excep­tion of one share of Apple stock that mybrandz.com sent me unso­licited, I cur­rently own no stocks apart from mutual funds — if you asked me which com­pa­nies these funds invest in, I couldn’t tell you. If I have any finan­cial rela­tion­ship with a busi­ness I write about, I’ll do my best to dis­close it. I cur­rently do not accept adver­tis­ing on my blogs Socialmedia.biz, Socialbrite.org and JDLasica.com.

Speak­ing fees

I accept fees to speak at con­fer­ences and indus­try events. Com­pen­sa­tion may also cover my travel and lodg­ing expenses.

Intel Insid­ers program

I am a mem­ber of Intel’s Insid­ers pro­gram, which is a group of about 10 peo­ple who are experts in var­i­ous areas of social media. The Intel Insid­ers group fol­lows the Word of Mouth Mar­ket­ing Asso­ci­a­tion code of ethics and acts as a social media advi­sory board to pro­vide Intel with ongo­ing feed­back — both pub­lic and pri­vate — on the company’s prod­ucts and social media efforts. The program’s orga­niz­ers stress that par­tic­i­pants are free to write any­thing they want about Intel prod­ucts and events. There has been no mon­e­tary com­pen­sa­tion pro­vided for my par­tic­i­pa­tion in this pro­gram other than reim­burse­ment for travel expenses and occa­sional free prod­ucts. As a ges­ture of grat­i­tude for par­tic­i­pants’ time and involve­ment, Intel has pro­vided mem­bers of the pro­gram with a free Mac­Book Air lap­top and (months later) a Core i7 Dell PC.

Finally, a word of thanks to tech jour­nal­ist Kara Swisher for her excel­lent, detailed Ethics State­ment, which should serve as a model for other blog­gers, jour­nal­ists and review­ers.

JD Lasica works with major com­pa­nies and non­prof­its on social media strate­gies. See his busi­ness pro­file, con­tact JD or leave a comment.

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