Do Hospital Blogs Lose Credibility by Accepting Paid Advertising?

Earlier this year, Mayo Clinic received some fairly harsh criticism for accepting paid advertising on its blog. You can read one example of that criticism in an article from Mark Schaefer titled “Lessons from a horrible social media strategy.”  Here’s a quote from Mark’s article, but read the whole thing to understand the context:

“Here is a word I rarely use on my my blog: Stupid.  But I think it is an unavoidable description when an organization sells the soul of their brand for a few advertising dollars with a mindless strategy of advertising children’s clothes to women who have just lost their child.”

As Mark points out, one of the challenges with accepting advertising and having it appear on the same page as health content, is that at times it will make you appear to be stupid and you run the risk of offending readers when the ads…