Changing the Way People and Business Communicate

by Chris Brogan

First, my simple measure of what is ethical and what is not, as told to me by a professor in the late 1990s: “If you don’t want to talk about it with your family at the dinner table,… and you don’t want to read about it on the front page of the Boston Globe, it’s not ethical.” Seems easy to me. (Essentially, ethics are our guideline of what we consider right and wrong.)

In public relations and marketing, the primary goal is that those acting as an agent for an organization, their professional communicators, move the needle in some way. In PR, that might be press mentions, or blog posts, or publicity through speaking at conferences. In marketing, the projects can be more complex, or more indirect, but all relate to getting some other lever or number somewhere to move. There are nuanced and personable ways to do this, and then there are heavy-handed, let’s just call them SPAMMY, ways to do this.

You could do that. You could spam 10,000 people to get 100 positive results to show your client. But, as Todd Defren pointed out in the class, in the old days, those people used to have no voice, no real recourse that mattered or could be seen. Today? Everyone can blog. Everyone can put the word out that your organization is spamming them. Not only would it be less ethical to attempt to gain customers this way; it would be bad business.

Here’s the thing: Google remembers everything. And by “Google,” technically I mean the web at large (by which, I still mean Google, don’t I?). So, by extension, pretty much ALL business you do in social media can be “remembered” by anyone interested in what you’re doing, and where you’ve been, and what comes next. This, by the way, features heavily in Trust Agents, my forthcoming book with Julien Smith, but that’s a tangent for another time.

In a world where the entire space around you “remembers” your choices and your actions, do you have much in the way of an alternative but to operate ethically?

http://www.chrisbrogan.com/the-ethics-imperative-in-social-media/