Yes, "white papers are hot." So says MarketingSherpa in their new report, How to Syndicate Your White Paper Successfully -- 12 Steps, 8 Mistakes & Creative Samples –- Part I (open access through Dec. 10).

We've known that white papers are hot for a long time. Sherpa's report gives us a good excuse to promote our own white paper on white papers: Eight Secrets for Creating Great White Papers. Since this piece is co-sponsored by our friends at KnowledgeStorm (KS also distributes it), and since KnowledgeStorm is referenced in the Sherpa article, it's fair to say that Paul's early thought leadership has entered the "conventional wisdom" on white papers. Validation is a beautiful thing.

If you follow corporate blogging at all, you might have heard of a recent scandal involving Wal-Mart and their PR firm, Edelman. In an attempt to counter the bad press that Wal-Mart was getting about its treatment of its employees, it hired Edelman to do some blogger relations.

But Edelman's approach was to create a fake blog, now known as a "flog," about a couple who RV'd across America from Wal-Mart to Wal-Mart. The couple turned out to be a professional writer and photographer who were paid by Edelman. There's a great summary of the story on Debbie Weil's blog, along with a long list of links to other blogs and articles that tell the full story.
One major consequence of this scandal is that blog readers will start suspecting a corporate ulterior motive behind even the most apparently grass-roots blogs. That's a shame, but perhaps inevitable. Our culture is already healthily skeptical of what we see in the news and entertainment media, because we know that corporate machines can manipulate them...why not the emerging social media, too?

This brouhaha is interesting to me as someone who helps The Content Factor's clients with their corporate blogs. Where is the line between providing writing content for a client's blog, and flogging?

For us, the yardstick of integrity is: represent a real person's real message. Even if we are the ones composing the words, our clients' blogs still represent our clients' ideas accurately. We will never take on a fake persona, or intentionally fail to disclose our relationship to our client.

The Word Of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) has published a code of ethics (ironically, a code that Edelman helped create) which sums it up nicely: Honesty of Relationship, Opinion, and Identity.

While working on blogs for a few different clients, I have started "drinking the Kool-Aid" from Google. I'm using a Google custom home page, which gives me all sorts of widgets, which I can organize on my own tabs.

Here's a picture of my custom home page (the first tab).

I can make a widget out of any RSS feed, including Google News searches and Google Blog searches. So, I created a tab for each client, and on that tab I can add...

• Blog searches on appropriate keywords, created in Google Alerts
• News searches on appropriate keywords, also from Google Alerts
• Bookmarks to sites I want to monitor--made from lists I compose in del.icio.us (Wikipedia on del.icio.us) and then display using the del.icio.us widget
• Feeds from the blogs I want to monitor

So now I have a dashboard of the latest news and blog postings for each client. And to get to it, all I have to do is click the Google logo on my Google toolbar. Sweet!

So, if you're a Content Factor client and you were wondering how we found the latest article or blog post so quickly...now you know.