Image courtesy of kkimpel on Flickr
From time to time, you’ll see us do a review of a fitness product, exercise game, food or diet supplement, or whatever else around here. Most of the time, it’s because one of us owns it already; sometimes, we’ve gotten a trial sample of something, or are given the use of it for a while. A lot of the time, what you’ll read here originates from very close to home – Mike and Krystalle get a ton of use out of the exergaming titles they have for their Wii; both they and Scott and have made Weight Watchers a guiding principle in their eating habits; and my copy of Starting Strength sits right here on my desk, underneath the notebook where I log my daily workouts. It’s not just fiction authors who live by the dictum, “Write what you know.”
The companies that have been kind enough to send us review samples have done so knowing that we’re going to be giving you, our readers, our honest assessment of whatever they may be offering. Whether it’s effusive enthusiasm, a thumbs-up with a caveat, or some well-earned derision, we’re not going to sugar-coat what we say.
That’s not how we roll, whether it’s 1d4 or 8d12.
That self-righteous bit of editorial indignation was spurred by reading an article in The Times Online, detailing how children are giving paid endorsements of various products on social-media sites – especially soft drinks and candy, but also toys, gadgets, and music. There have been recent reports detailing the erosion of interpersonal trust when it comes to certain kinds of social media interactions, and this sort of thing is exactly what’s causing it. There was a huge brouhaha among many of our friends in the blogosphere when the United States government, and the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) in particular, pushed for bloggers to say when they’re giving a paid endorsement in their writing. Frankly, it seems like a very good idea to know when someone is giving you their honest, unprompted enthusiasm about something versus when they’ve got a stake in pushing a product or service.
I don’t know about you, but I like being able to trust my friends.
Online, we’re all just words to one another. If those words aren’t worth the photons they’re shooting at you because you don’t trust the person behind them, then how much good are they?
Not a $@&(*# bit, if you ask me.
We’re going to tell it to you straight, or we’re not going to bother. We’re up-front and honest about being geeks around this place. We’re going to be just as honest about everything else, too.
And that, as Stephen Colbert says, is The Word.
(I’d thank @BethanTuttle for bringing that link to my attention (originally from @StephenBalkam), but as you can see, “thanks” might not be quite the right term for it.)
In the interest of continued and complete transparency, I very occasionally do a bit of social marketing on my personal journal else-web, for a company called BzzAgent. Their policy dictates that anyone engaged in one of their campaigns says, right up front, that they’re participating in it, and what the deal is. In the unlikely event that the Venn diagram that is my life has any ShrinkGeek overlap with that stuff, there will not be any question about when that takes place.
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