Ethics

Thursday, January 07, 2010

FIR Interview: Andrea Weckerle, Founder and President, CiviliNation

Andrea Weckerle has fulfilled a longtime ambition by establishing CiviliNation, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to “foster an online culture where every person can freely participate in a democratic, open, rational and truth-based exchange of ideas and information, without fear or threat of being the target of unwarranted abuse, harassment, or lies.” In this FIR Interview, co-host Shel Holtz discusses with Weckerle the organization’s origins, its goals and how Weckerle hopes CiviliNation can make a difference.

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Links Mentioned in the Interview

• Wall Street Journal Online article, “Keeping a Civil Cybertongue
• David Solove’s book, The Future of Reputation (via Amazon U.S.)

About our Conversation Partner

Andrea Weckerle is an attorney licensed to practice law in Washington D.C. and New Jersey.  She earned her Juris Doctor at T.C. Williams School of Law, University of Richmond, where she also served on the Senior Staff of the Richmond Journal of Law & Technology, the first exclusively online, student-edited law journal in the U.S. In addition to her law degree, she underwent extensive mediation training, earning certificates in Commercial Mediation, Conflict Resolution Processes, and Healthcare Mediation. She also holds a Master of Arts degree in Communications/Conflict Analysis and Resolution from George Mason University.

After law school, Andrea worked within the Legal Management Services division of an international professional services firm, where she helped design, develop and implement comprehensive alternative dispute resolution systems for Fortune 500 companies. During her tenure at the firm, she also served on the international team of a high-profile, politically sensitive investigatory review of World War II-era banking records for two international financial institutions and a U.S. state regulatory agency. Prior to founding CiviliNation, she ran her own boutique communications consultancy and worked with nationally-recognized agencies, where her experience included legal and corporate communications, as well as online communications and social media.

Andrea lived in Pakistan, Madagascar, Germany and the United States while growing up and now resides in the United States. She is bilingual in English and German.

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This FIR Interview is brought to you with Lawrence Ragan Communications, serving communicators worldwide for 35 years. Information: www.ragan.com.

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Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Just how social can you be if your online content is exclusionary?

I spent some time today, while at the IABC Heritage Region Conference, with Amy Salmon. Amy is a business consultant based out of Oklahoma City. She’s wife and a mom to two young children.

She’s also blind, the result of macular degeneration that struck her as a young adult. She gets around with the help of friends and family, and her guide dog, Wilbur.

Amy’s consultancy (she’s part of The Rodgers Group, a longtime communications firm run by Amy’s sister, Vicci Rodgers) works to help companies make their online content accessible to the disabled. According to the U.S. Census, more than 54 million people in the U.S. are disabled, representing about 19% of the population. As baby boomers age, the percentage of people with disabilities—and blindness in particular—is poised to rise dramatically.

For a lot of the disabled, getting through a typical website is beyond challenging. It’s impossible. Amy, for example, prefers to shop for her kids online. It’s easier than getting someone to take her to the store and help her identify the products she needs. On the WalMart site, she is able to find products, but she can’t order; that requires a mouse click. A mouse is an essentially useless tool to a blind person, Amy told me.

(Incidentally, Amy won’t shop at Target at all. The only reason the iconic retailer’s site is compliant with the accessibility standards established by the World Wide Web consortium is that they were ordered to by a federal judge following a lawsuit filed by the National Federation of the Blind.)

In the U.K., a study determined that purchases the blind cannot make on inaccessible website account for tens of millions of pounds. I’d love to know the results of such a study in the U.S. with its considerably larger population.

Amy uses a tool called Wave—not the new Google communication tool everyone’s talking about, but a more established site for evaluating a website’s accessibility. I plugged in the URL for WalMart’s home page; Wave returned 10 accessibility errors, including Javascript that can’t be interpreted by a text-to-voice reader, hidden content, problematic link text (text that “does not make sense out of context”), headings that are not appropriately marked, event handlers, and more. And all this was just on the home page.

I was also struck by Amy’s stories about talking to companies about the inaccessability of their sites. She has been told, flat-out, “We don’t care about that part of the market.” A key reason: remediating sites to make them accessible could be costly, particularly for ecommerce-based sites with thousands or pages.

Much of Amy’s consulting business comes her way via legal departments. Businesses are concerned about avoiding lawsuits. Accommodating nearly a fifth of the market? Not so much.

Accessibility is not a new issue. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the Web back in 1989 and heads up the Worldwide Web Consortium, has said, “The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect.” (Here are more quotes from Berners-Lee about accessibility, an issue he clearly believes in.)

But considering all the proclamations by companies that they want to build relationships through social media, accessibility should be a more prominent goal. When companies establish Twitter and Facebook fan pages in order to be more accessible, isn’t it disingenuous—even hypocritical—to maintain online content that can’t be consumed by those whom life has handed the additional challenge of blindness, deafness, or cognitive or physical limitations?

Just how social can you claim to be if your online content excludes this segment of society, this potentially lucrative slice of your market? It’s hardly sincere to claim to be engaged while simultaneously proclaiming, “Sorry, the blind and deaf are not welcome.”

Part of the problem is that nobody wants to be accountable. Communications professionals tell Amy it’s not their problem; talk to IT, they say. (Wave detected 20 accessibility errors on the PRSA website.) But part of the problem is lack of attention. Tens of thousands of people can protest a Motrin video that offends them, but good luck finding a surge of indignation around a site that denies access to the disabled.

I’ll be talking with Amy for an interview segment on my podcast, “For Immediate Release. In the meantime, I just wanted to make the point: It should give you pause the next time you tout your social efforts if your own online content includes a huge “Go Away” sign for anybody who isn’t fortunate enough to be free of disabilities.

Tuesday, October 06, 2009

Clear disclosure in 140 characters

The FTC’s freshly-minuted disclosure rules for bloggers and the companies that reach out to them may be sounding alarms among those who aren’t already disclosure-minded, but a lot of bloggers and companies have always been mindful of candor and honesty. Long before the FTC even began looking at governing a practice that PR people, marketers, advertisers and bloggers weren’t policing for themselves, some businesses (SHIFT Communications and Ogilvy PR) were promoting clear policies of disclosure.

But disclosure can be problematic, even among those with honorable intentions. How, exactly, should a blogger disclose a relationship with a company in such a way as to satisfy all possible readers (and, now, the government)?

Twitter makes it an even dicier proposition. With only 140 characters to get across your message—and part of that taken up with your account name—you may think you’ve disclosed your relationship as well as you can, only to find some followers think you’ve been deceptive. And the FTC’s $11,000 fine is nothing to sneeze at.

Digitas Emerging Channels Specialist Jon Burg (who’s also the brother of a non-communications family friend) has taken a stab at creating a protocol for Twitter disclosure. The idea of Jon’s “short-form disclosure” is simple and elegant. It requires only four of your 140 characters. For example, if I worked for Ford Motor Company as a social media representative talking about the Ford Fusion, I would send a tweet like this:

Great customer testimonial about the Ford Fusion. >SPK

>SPK discloses that you’re a spokesperson for the brand or campaign.

Here’s Jon’s complete list of proposed short-form disclosure codes (click it to enlarge it):

I’ve already seen it suggested that widespread adoption of Jon’s short-form disclosure isn’t likely, but I disagree. We’ve seen Twitter’s user community create several conventions that have become standard, including the @ symbol, RT, and the dot before an account name. If the user community decides to embrace short-form disclosure, it’ll spread.

Of course, not everyone on Twitter would have a reason to adopt short-form disclosure, so it would be up to us who do have a legitimate need to disclose to start using them.

At this point, Jon’s not proposing we start running with these, but rather have a conversation about them leading to eventual refinement into something we can all agree on.

I’m hopeful Jon’s first pass at short-form disclosure gains traction, produces discussion, and leads to a standard. It won’t happen if you don’t join the conversation and commit to using the resulting codes. Feel free to comment here, but I’d encourage you to share your thoughts on Jon’s post, too.

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Let’s whine like it’s 1999

There has been a flurry of activity in the PR corners of a variety of social channels today. These messages have been filled with angst and vile and anger. There has been finger-pointing, name-calling and threats.

What could motivate such an outpouring of emotion? A particularly egregious case of astroturfing? The revelation that a PR agency is behind a front organization for an unethical organization seeking to do evil? An outrageous use of a social channel by a particularly arrogant PR practitioner?

It was none of these things. It was—and I can’t believe I’m writing these words—a reply-all fiasco on an email listserv.

The original email that kicked the whole thing off was no different than the couple dozen pitches I get every day. I was on a list—evidently, a good-sized one—of people with some connection to social media to which a solicitation was blasted. As soon as I saw it, I deleted it. Normally, I wouldn’t name the individual who made the initial mistake, but her name is all over the Internet right now, as evidenced by this very small fragment of tweets on the topic:

The pitch was to review an ebook. The event that led to the downward spiral in this instance was one recipient—an innocent soul named Donna—who responded positively. Incidentally, Donna was smacked down for being too ignorant to know not to respond to a pitch. That, in itself, was way out of line. I don’t like mass pitches any more than anyone else, but if a pitch happens to look like something I, my readers or my clients would be interested in, I reply. There’s nothing wrong with responding to something that genuinely interests you.

So Donna replied. Unfortunately, she appears to have replied to all. There were only two addresses to whom she could have replied. First, there was the PR agent who sent the original mail. Second, there was a single email address that, as it turns out, was a list address. By including the list address, she unwittingly sent her request to everybody who received the first pitch. But without careful examination of that address, Donna could not have known that.

Among those receiving Donna’s request for a copy of the ebook was an anxious author whose new book, “Twitterville,” is due out September 3. (In fact, I’m attending a launch party for the book this weekend.) So, when my friend Shel Israel saw an email in his inbox that said, “Can you send a review copy?” Shel enthusiastically responded and copied the reply to the publicity people promoting his book.

And he evidently also used the “reply all.” There was still was no reason for anybody to suspect these messages were going to a large list of people. Those individual names weren’t showing up in the CC line; it was still just the email address of the list, the original sender (Beth) and the person to whom shel was replying (Donna).

Shortly after that, the torrent began. As soon as I saw what was happening, I took 20 seconds (and not a second more) to create a filter in my email client that redirected all messages containing the same subject line to the trash. If I hadn’t started to see blog posts and tweets on the subject, I never would have noticed another single one of these messages.

Evidently, there are a lot of otherwise smart people in the PR world who don’t know how to deal with a problem that that has cropped up every few months for the last quarter of a century.

But now the fun was beginning. People began invoking “reply all” in order to—you can feel it coming, can’t you?—demand that people stop replying “all.” Each one of these added the individual email address of the message being responded to. And so on. And so on. Each response led to a CC: line crammed with more and more individual email addresses. Each response reflected increasingly hot tempers.

We had unfounded accusations, such as the individual who blamed the whole thing on Shel Israel’s publicist, wrongly believing that it was a promotion for “Twitterville” and not a completely unrelated ebook. Someone from AdAge threatened to name everyone who sent a “reply all” demanding that people stop using “reply all.” (He later reconsidered.) There were those who let everyone else know just how unable they were to control their emotions, like the individual whose message (to “all”) read, “Take me off this fucking list which I never asked to be on and can’t unsubscribe from.”

(To be fair, many of the requests were quite civil—but they still found their way to everyone on the list because they were sent using “reply all.”)

Actually, you could unsubscribe from the list. There was a link at the bottom of the original email, and each subsequent message, that connected to a page where you could unsubscribe. But this led to the next round of emails, as each unsbuscribe notification wound up getting circulated to everyone on the list.

Once again, 20 seconds to create an email filter and I didn’t see any more of these, either. For some people, though, it was easier (and evidently more gratifying) to write, “wtf is going on here? why am I now receiving email support tickets!? unsubscribe me from anything and everything you people are involved with and leave me alone!”

There’s personal branding for you.

The only reason I know how people have been responding is that I have visited my email trash and retrieved all these messages in the wake of the kerfuffle they have produced.

Ten years ago, such a vitriolic response was to be expected. But today? Among a group of people who were on a list in the first place because of their supposed online savvy? And they’re still replying “all” when demanding to be removed from a list??

I sincerely hope these aren’t the same people lamenting how slowly others are embracing social media. If we don’t have the basics down yet, what hope is there for real progress?

Friday, July 17, 2009

The ethics of publishing stolen material

IABC President Julie Freeman TechCrunch’s decision to publish internal documents stolen from Twitter, “Was it appropriate to publish stolen documents?  Even if the information obtained was accurate?  Was it ethical?  Does the public have the right to know how Twitter (or any company) plans to make its money and when?  Does how information is obtained affect whether it should be published?”

I’ve decided to post my answer here.

I was struck by one of Robert Scoble‘s remarks on FriendFeed, part of a lengthy discussion on the controversy. In response to the argument that nothing in the Twitter documents seemed to rise to the level of “public interest” that would justify their publication, Robert wrote, “I went to journalism school and we were taught to publish information, even stuff that was gotten through questionable means, and not hold back when it comes across our desk.”

I went to journalism school, too, though admittedly many years earlier than Robert. But I don’t remember ever being taught to publish whatever crossed my desk. Given how long it’s been, though, since I sat in a journalism ethics class, I decided to throw the question to a friend who is the chair of the journalism school at a reputable university. (I haven’t heard back from him with permission to cite him, but will update this post when he returns, assuming he gives me the go-ahead.)

I presented the situation in generic terms: “A reporter finds a package on his desk. He opens it and finds it contains documents that were clearly and unquestionably stolen from the source. Their exposure does not serve the public interest (unlike, say, The Pentagon Papers or the Brown & Williamson documentation whistle-blower Jeffrey Wigand turned over to 60 Minutes).”

Here’s what I heard back:

• First, the editor would have to verify the contents and try to figure out who delivered it, where they got it from, and so on.
• Most reporters would try to find another source to corroborate the information.
• A reporter or editor would have to evaluate the news value vs. the privacy and potential harm issues.

This response dovetails nicely with my own recollection of journalism ethics from my days in journalism school (1972-1976). It’s also inconsistent with Robert’s “publish stuff” approach and the quote TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington offered as justification: ““News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising” (attributed to newspaper magnate Lord Northcliffe, although there’s no evidence he actually said it).

I’ve seen dozens of definitions of news and most of them convey the same fundamentals: News is information or an event that is current, involves some kind of change from the way things are, and has an impact on a group of people. While the communication of such stories may piss some people off, that’s not the criteria for deciding what gets covered. Rather, it’s something journalists shouldn’t let influence them when deciding whether to go to press with a story.

As near as I can tell, nothing in the Twitter documents published by TechCrunch rises to the level of “public interest.” It was published because it was titillating and would draw traffic.

Given that there is probably no legal liability for publishing these documents, you have to ask yourself who would be most inclined to publish stolen content the release of which does not serve the public interest. It reminds me of ethics discussions we had when I worked for a global consulting firm. If somebody handed you a proposal stolen from a competitor for a client you were bidding on, would you use it to improve your own chances of winning the work? Answer: No, we’d return it to the company from which it was stolen. (On the other hand, if someone from the competing firm happened to leave a copy lying around, that’s another story.)

Pepsi embodied the highest ethical standards when they refused to accept a formula stolen from Coca-Cola and offered to them for a price, opting instead to turn the material back over to Coke and the thief to the police.

My friend, the journalism school chair, did suggest that “Murdoch would definitely publish (the documents).” He’s speaking of Rupert, of course, whose News Corp. owns such bastions of journalism as The Sun and News of the World, two of the most brazen London tabloids.

Nowhere in Michael Arrington’s many, many words devoted to the Twitter documents did he indicate that he tried to find an alternate legitimate source for the information, corroborate it or engage in any of the other practices ethical journalists are expected to embrace. Perhaps Rupert Murdoch should consider acquiring TechCrunch, since they would seem to be birds of a feather.

One has to wonder how Arrington would have reacted if the confidential internal documents in question had been stolen from TechCrunch and published by Mashable or ReadWriteWeb (not to suggest that either of these sites would publish stolen documents). Somehow I suspect he would have been a little less cavalier about the ethical breech.

Monday, July 06, 2009

Proactive disclosure now a requirement for influencer outreach

On the heels of reports that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is set to regulate companies and the bloggers they reach out to comes a series of reports about Betty Crocker’s campaign to get bloggers talking about its new line of gluten-free food products.

What struck me was this excerpt from Tiffany Janes’ report in Examiner.com (the website of the San Francisco Examiner):

When blog posts began appearing about the new Betty Crocker gluten-free products, it was apparent that the company was sending out samples to people to test taste and review gluten-free products before they were introduced to the public. There were too many such posts for this to be just ‘friends of friends’ who worked for the company getting in on the action.

In other words, the volume of posts raised eyebrows and suspicions. Janes goes on to explain that “the mystery…is solved” by pointing to a website from General Mills designed to enlist bloggers to write about its products—including the Betty Crocker line—that involves the company sending free product to bloggers who sign up so they can try the foods and then write about them.

Clearly, General Mills wasn’t trying to keep its blogger outreach effort a secret, not with its My Blog Spark website right out there in the open. But until it was “found,” it was only natural for those struck by the sudden blogger interest in Betty Crocker products to wonder if something not quite on the up-and-up was going on.

There is, as this situation suggests, a difference between disclosure and transparency.

They’re related, to be sure, but tactically speaking, they serve different functions. The discoverability of My Blog Spark made the effort transparent. But in this case, transparency is passive. Disclosure could have been a very active process of letting everyone know what you’re doing.

One of the goals of a transparency effort is to preclude any hint of trying to hide your behavior. But it only works if those inclined to point an accusatory finger know that you have, in fact, behaved transparently. In this case, pushing disclosure solves the problem.

Most disclosure isn’t pushed. It’s a statement (such as my disclosure, right here, that General Mills was once a client of mine, several years ago) that is published somewhere. When an executive includes a box on his blog that his posts are edited by his communications staff, that’s typical passive disclosure.

But blogger outreach screams for active disclosure.

A search of press releases on the General Mills Media Center turns up no releases at all announcing the My Blog Spark initiative. By not issuing a press release or making some other kind of disclosure, General Mills didn’t violate any code of ethics or fail to behave transparently. But the fact that bloggers taking General Mills up on its offer led some to ask the ethics question leads me to think that any blogger outreach these days needs to be accompanied by proactive disclosure via press release, RSS feed, tweet or whatever other push channels will get the word out.

I can even see a company that does a lot of blogger outreach—or even PR agencies handling the effort on behalf of their clients—posting regular updates to a blog (with its RSS feed) focused on the company’s outreach programs.

Of course, even pushing disclosure doesn’t not guarantee that people like Tiffany Janes will be aware of it, but when questions arise and people begin digging, the company’s completely open explanation of its outreach program will be right there for everyone to see. As a result, there’s no chance that anyone can construe the company’s campaign as devious or covert.

All of which could go a long way toward keeping the FTC off their backs once those regulations go into effect.

Monday, November 24, 2008

Another call for a blogger code of ethics

A blogger code of ethics is another meme that seems to make the rounds every six months or so. This time, the call comes from Datuk Seri Syed Hamid Albar, Malaysia’s home minister, who said,

Blogging is touching the lives of more and more Malaysians. With such a powerful tool, bloggers are able to influence their readers and shape their perspectives. They can unite communities and they can divide them. The dangers of distortions and inaccuracies in blogging are very real and it is capable of destroying lives. Thanks in part to the blogosphere, dangerous assumptions often travel faster than truths…The comment and talkback sections had unfortunately provided a channel for people to espouse hatred and racial sentiments, using it as a conduit for constantly validating their negative opinion. There is no excuse for this, which is something all parties need to seriously look into.

Albar was speaking at the Blogger’s Bluff 2008 conference, which somehow escaped my notice. According to a report in The Star Online, Albar said the code would not rise to the level of legislation, but it would hold bloggers accountable for what they wrote.

Well, it’s not like Malaysia has served as a beacon of free speech.

The problem with Albar’s call for a code of ethics is the same for any such efforts: Those inclined to abide by a code of ethics are already behaving themselves while those who are not will reject it and continue merrily cranking out whatever they want.

Codes of ethics work only when they are backed by an organization that has the power to sanction members who violate them. My professional association, IABC, has a code of ethics that, without specifically referencing blogs, covers most of the unethical behaviors in which a blogger could engage. Other associations representing the communications profession tout their own codes. But few organizations have shown themselves willing to smack down members who violate their codes.

And even if Malaysia puts the power of the government behind its code, bloggers who reject it could simply blog anonymously, using Blogger.com and Wordpress.com. While nearly all the evil done on the Net has been enabled by anonymity, it’s also the reason bloggers representing political opposition are able to function within repressive regimes.

What’s more, if countries begin implementing their own codes of ethics—different standards for each nation—things get even muddier. If I visit Malaysia, can they hold me accountable for something I wrote that violated their code but not the U.S. code?

It’s not that I don’t agree with the goals articulated by those who support a blogger code of ethics. It’ll just never work.