There’s merit to your caveat, some bloggers won’t benefit, lose trust for their audience –and then lose audience.

See the different ranges –some are so lightly branded such as blogging on a third party site and talking about ‘lifestyle’ –not even products. (Guy Kawasaki on AMEX site)

Where I do feel pretty strongly–and where we may disagree–is that bloggers whose value comes from their independence and reputation for integrity shouldn’t start *writing* the advertorials. That’s strikes me as the surest path to crossing the line.

http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2009/03/03/running-list-of-sponsored-conversations/

So even if we suppose it as fact that an author is being very honestly enthusiastic about some product or service, and even if we as a subgroup of readers *knew* that fact, we still wouldn’t blame other readers for their wariness. I doubt we would blame them even if they were wary of believing our own avowals of the author’s honesty.

But I’m not sure Daniel Lemire gets it quite right. Sure, money influences every author’s choice of what to write. Even if I were passionate about some perversity, I wouldn’t blog about it because I wouldn’t want to be embarrassed by it later in a business context (or any other!). But certainly there’s a useful distinction of degree to be made between this kind of highly attenuated influence and the concentrated influence we worry about with sponsored posts.

On the one hand, it’s very easy to predict what the sponsor wants and doesn’t want. The rewards are also much more salient since we know from the get-go the going rate for this and, thus, future posts. The net payoff function is pretty clear.

On the other hand, aside from edge-case perversity examples, it’s very difficult to predict what readers want to hear and don’t want to hear over the long term. (Will they get a kick out of a purely economic argument for honesty, or will they be disgusted at the mere thought?) It would take serious time and effort to tailor my every thought to the audience’s diverse tastes–whether here at The Noisy Channel or at my own blog. And I would likely still get it wrong–or, I would worry, more wrong than I would have had I written genuinely.

Trust is a resource authors build with readers over the long term. Any given post is but one among a pattern of them. Very simply, because the costs are higher and the returns substantially riskier, the expected return on a general strategy of dishonestly *over the long term* is much lower.

A sponsored post could break a pattern of long-term honesty. It might give readers special cause to think I’d shifted my blogging strategy from being spread out over a series of long-term posts and decisions, in which honesty pays, to being focused on monetizing one near-term lie.

Does being employed by Endeca constrain what I can write about? Yes, no doubt. I have an NDA, and I also try to avoid doing anything that would scandalize my employer, like putting up a picture of the Scorpions’ Virgin Killer album cover on my blog while discussing Wikipedia and internet censorship, or bad-mouthing customers or partners.

But, beyond that, I freely speak my mind. I own my domain, and no one at Endeca tries to control how I use it. Indeed, my colleagues in marketing appreciate my independence, since my association with Endeca would be worthless if I weren’t. I pity companies that agonize about implementing a “social media strategy” but haven’t figured this out.

Thankfully, in the modern world, in a modern organization, employees are not bound to the “corporation”.

If you are a decent person, you can even “kill” your own corporation (some people did it with Enron) and survive the fall.

So, I am much less worried about who pays you than whether you are a decent person.