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Friday, March 03, 2006

A new ethics for mass communication? New Communications Forum session

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From the New Communications Forum:

Phillip Young from Sunderland University

• More than transparency, people are talking about authenticity and the odd notion of “creating” authenticity. If authenticity is part-and-parcel of honesty—can you create honesty?
• Ethics has something to do with truth, honesty. In this new PR we’re doing, is there a new ethics? Answer is probably no. Ethics are the same, just put into new situations. Morality doesn’t change, only our expression of our morality changes. The new PR is throwing up great numbers of new challenges.
• As more and more people engage in conversation, more and more participants won’t be members of groups with codes of ethics.
• Are you more, equally, or less ethical than your competitors or people with whom you work? Some said more, some said equal, nobody indicated they were less ethical than their competitors. A lot of people think they’re more ethical than others—which means, we all keep to our own codes of ethics; we all have different ethical frameworks. Measured against our own standards, we’re more ethical than others.
• In PR, we work in partial truths. Tell whole truth, you won’t keep clients very long. We as a society agree to tolerate some partial truths.
• When a lot of voices can be heard, there’s an impact on truth, transparency, and authenticity.

Max Kalehoff, co-founder of Word Of Mouth Marketing Association

• Considering the rise of word-of-mouth, a lot of companies are working to figure it out and gravitate into this new space. A land grab and a conversation going on. People under pressure to achieve results for their organizations.
• Three key issues raising questions for ethical framework in which we work.
• First, and it’s an old one, is younger people coming in can be more susceptible to achieving result without ethical guidance
• Second, an issue for a lot of big brands and institutions hire agencies that may or may not operate as ethically as they should; part of WOMMA’s reason to exist is to highlight the scumbags.
• Third, product placement is getting to be a larger part of communication mix/strategy. Pushed by companies like P&G that have decided old media channels are broken.

Six points of WOMMA’s ethics code:

1. Protection of and respect for the consumer is paramount issue
2. Honesty ROI (honesty of relationship, opinion and identiy)
3. Respect the rules of the venue
4. Managing relationships with minors responsibly
5. Promoting honest downstream communications
6. Protect privacy and permission

Truth and transparency are different. Transparency is the opposite of privacy (according to Wikipedia. Truth is about facts; transparency is about the process. Can be transparent and ethical without revealing all truths.

The online world provides a window into process, which demands that companies engage in ethical processes. Internal decisions may not make sense, but people who are most interested would have made themselves aware of the process.

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