Ethics in Social Media Marketing: Responding to the Boston Tragedy. In my last blog post, . We set larger fan counts as a goal above authentic advocacy, and when meaningful engagement became difficult to achieve, we settled for anything that would earn a like, reply or retweet rather than striving for content that fostered relationships and created value. I will not rehash how I think these poor priorities and tactics undermined brand success in social media. For example, if we accept that a basic principle of social media is that ? Was it ethical to launch sweepstakes, contests and giveaways that motivated ? And if we further agree that engagement such as replies, retweets and shares ought to be authentic signals of interest in what brands have to say, then are we acting ethically when we solicit engagement merely to elevate our brands' Edge. Rank? Is asking Facebook users to . NBC Bay Area posted a photo of a young bombing victim and implored people to . Wwwww The Code of Ethics for Social Work Definition 6 British Association of Social Workers Ethical problems often arise because social workers, for example. A sensitive topic we've all grappled with as social media professionals is the subject of ethics in social media marketing practices, specifically: the. Chapter 4 Social Responsibility and Ethics: Sustainable Marketing 5 McDonald’s and its suppliers are collectively focused on three responsibility areas: ethical. You are true American heroes. The problem was that Ford didn't post that as text but included it within a beauty shot of their products, complete with the Ford logo and tagline. Ethics in social marketing Download ethics in social marketing or read online here in PDF or EPUB. Please click button to get ethics in social marketing book now. Page 1 Marketing Ethics to Social Marketers: A Segmented Approach Susan D. Andreasen Ethical behavior is by its nature individual behavior. Ethics definition, (used with a singular or plural verb) a system of moral principles: the ethics of a culture. Almost all the theoretical efforts in the area of marketing ethics have been normative, not positive. Th1at is, almost all theoretical. Part I – Social Responsibility, Ethics & Marketing International Marketing Conference on Marketing & Society, 8-10 April, 2007, IIMK 18 Literature Review. Not everyone will agree, but I feel that Ford's use of brand imagery not only reduced the sincerity of the message but demonstrated questionable ethics. Before you disagree, I would ask you to view the two status updates below- -one Ford could have posted and the other it actually did- -and consider three questions: Which is a more authentic expression of appreciation to people who sacrificed their safety to protect us? What does the product and brand imagery of the post on the right add (if anything) to the sincerity of the gratitude compared to the simple text version? Which version more clearly puts the focus on the heroes in Boston? They often are not clear cut, and while it is easy to see when a company crosses the line with both feet (as did NBC Bay Area), it can tough to discern as brands toe the gray line (as did Ford, in my opinion). It is even tougher to see when you yourself cross ethical lines. If your boss wants to know why your brand has half a million customers but only 2. Facebook, a sweepstakes to accumulate fans may not seem unethical. Your perspective may change, however, if you put yourself on the other side of this equation; if you do not want to see your friends becoming shills for brands in return for freebies and giveaways, then your brand should not follow this path. It is unethical to treat your own customers in a way you would not appreciate from the brands you buy or the people you know. You wouldn’t tell lies to your own wife. Don’t tell them to mine. Study after study demonstrate that consumers want something more from brands than silly images and memes; they want ethical behaviors and communications. The 2. 01. 2 Edelman Trust Barometer Study found that customers increasingly expect brands to . How can we improve both the ethics of social media marketing and our brands? Here are three steps: STEP ONE: Understand Long- Standing Marketing Ethics, Advertising Rules and Regulation. Marketing has a long and well established history of recognizing and enforcing ethical practices, and government regulation of advertising is over one hundred years old. The issues we struggle with today in social media marketing are not new, nor are the core beliefs of ethical marketing. The latter can inform the former for those who care to learn history. In 1. 91. 1, the Associated Advertising Clubs issued the Ten Commandments of ethical advertising, and the first Commandment was unequivocal: . Together, these two actions established one of the most basic tenets of advertising ethics: That consumers must know when they are seeing advertising and not mistake it for editorial content. This is as true in the pages of newspapers as in the tweets and posts of your customers. Although the core principles of ethical advertising have not changed in one hundred years, the regulatory language has evolved with technology. In 2. 00. 9, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued . Just last month, the FTC updated disclosure guidelines, providing quite detailed guidance. For example, the FTC notes that . The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has issued several decisions pertaining to social media that brands' must consider for their social media guidelines, monitoring policies and employment practices. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has oversight into how and when social media may be used to share information pertinent to investors. Different states have enacted laws with varied requirements for consumer and employee privacy in social media. And then there are the terms and conditions of the social networks themselves, which define what is and is not permissible. It is vital social media professionals know the laws, rules and ethical standards that have stood the test of time, and it is necessary for marketing leaders to ensure their social media teams are adequately trained and supervised. STEP TWO: Improve Social Media Metrics“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts” - Albert Einstein Bad metrics lead to bad strategies. More than that, bad metrics can lead to unethical behaviors. The Great Recession of 2. President Obama laid blame on the way executives were measured and compensated. He noted in a June 2. Fans and engagement are not business metrics, but these are common line items on many social media scorecards and are used by social media agencies and vendors to validate performance. Any brand can count new fans, but how many are measuring the value delivered to the brand via social media? Instead of turning to the metrics that are easiest to collect, social media marketers must determine the metrics that best validate that their social media investments deliver upon the objectives (and if one of your goals is merely to collect fans, then the problem is not the metric but the goal). This is the point in the blog post when I am supposed to furnish an easy answer for how to measure social media success; unfortunately, I cannot. The ways to measure success are as diverse as brands, audiences and corporate objectives. If you want to better educate your customers on your products, measure that. If you need to raise awareness, measure that. If increasing inbound traffic to your site is desired, measure it. If your brand is challenged to improve a particular perception attribute, then that is what you should measure. Start with your corporate goals and challenges; pick the metrics that align to those; determine the social media strategies that best deliver on those metrics; and execute! As our investments in social media increase, so must the science and insightfulness of our metrics. Too many brands are merely counting things- -fans, retweets, comments and likes- -while ignoring the deeper and more meaningful measures of brand awareness, recall, consideration, association, preference and advocacy. Honesty is not merely the absence of falsehoods; telling no lies in your social networks is only the starting point. Thorough honesty requires something more- -more self- reflection, more care and more vigilance. It requires integrity and sometimes even courage. Honesty requires a tenacious commitment to complete transparency. If you encourage people to tweet a photo of your product in return for a chance to win a prize, complete transparency demands those tweets be accompanied with a disclosure. It is one thing for consumers to choose to tweet their brand love with no expectation of reward (even if the brand solicits those recommendations), but if your brand creates the conditions where someone is motivated to promote your brand in order to win something, you must ensure transparency. It is deceptive to look the other way and allow consumers to be exposed to sponsored advertising communications without disclosure. Honesty necessitates assertive vigilance to ensure that your employees, vendors and agencies are doing the right thing. It is not sufficient to assume your employees and partners know how to act with integrity, nor is satisfactory to set expectations and assume adherence. Honesty requires a commitment to education and engagement around ethics, and it demands that your brand supervises and monitors activities to ensure policies and regulations are followed. Honesty demands sincerity in the intent of your communications. In paid media, brands communicate to persuade and sell, but in social media consumers expect something different from brands- -it is a medium where consumers can choose to follow, comment and share, or they can choose to unfollow, block and ignore. Engagement should be earned with content that actually engages, not with tricks. For example, if you care to take a poll on Facebook, use Facebook's . Your intent with this sort of deceptive status update is not to engage consumers or learn from their answers but to manipulate Facebook's Edge. Rank system. Honest relationships cannot be built with dishonest communications. Honesty requires that you enter conversations to authentically join the conversation, not to co- opt the conversation. A new trend in social media is so- called . While it is possible for brands to post just the right thing at just the right time in a way that consumers will welcome, much of the recent RTM has been brazenly self interested and thus unsuccessful. The problem is that brands have dishonestly attempted to inject advertising messaging into consumer conversations rather than trying to authentically express themselves or add value to those conversations. If your brand can bring value to the conversation, do so honestly, but if you just want to interrupt consumers' conversations with brand advertising, then stay silent honestly (or honestly pay for media). Honesty demands that you walk the talk. The Ethics of Social Media Marketing. A sensitive topic we've all grappled with as social media professionals is the subject of ethics in social media marketing practices, specifically: the proper uses of, often times, very personal data. The story is complex and one blog post will certainly not solve the many ethical dilemmas that data privacy presents. For example, there are ethical concerns about how social networks inform users of what their privacy levels are, how to change them and to what degree their data is deemed 'public.' There are ethical concerns about the uses of data in complex political and legal situations in which people might be at risk if their identity is revealed. Lastly there are ethical concerns around the use of social media data for brand marketing purposes where the lines blur between 'relevant' and just plain old 'creepy.' I want to specifically address this last concern. My position: I believe that brand marketing within social media is a positive step forward for the end consumer, but I also contend that there is a tremendous amount of progress yet to be made to fulfill on this positive vision. First: Why is social media marketing a positive step forward for the end consumer? As a 4. 0- something year. I have spent a vast majority of my life utterly bombarded with marketing and advertising media. Every aspect of my life is permeated by messaging about how I should, could or, in some other better life, would live my currently less than optimal life. If only, I wane, I had product x, y or z and all my ills would be solved, all fears allayed, all dreams realized. Over time, the messaging has dulled our senses and for a period the ads had to become more and more sensational just to get our attention at all. Then social media showed up on the scene. With the advent of social media the idea of understanding a person's personal taste became a reality. The marketer no longer had to boil the ocean with a single idea. The marketer could move beyond analyzing the standard fare of demographic and psychographic data presented by a TV show advertising opportunity, a magazine buy or a website display ad for example. Now, the marketer can read the data of what people like, what their affiliations are, how they engage with the world online and begin to carve out who their best audience really is. They can find the people that want to hear from them. In sum: By knowing more about their audience and having a direct channel to reach them brands can reach the right people, the people who truly do want to hear from them. Secondly, when they do reach their target audience they no longer engage in a 'top- down' manner; instead brands are able to listen and create truly engaging and more meaningful ways of interacting with that audience: from interactive applications that make people's lives easier, to rich media campaigns that are relevant, entertaining and even at times cause based or political. The bottom line: The communication funnel is being reversed. The end consumer is now the one able to determine the landscape of their marketing experience and the brand is better off as a result. As I mentioned early on, it's not all a rosy parade. Brands have a long way to go to get better at understanding how to use social media as a listening device that shapes their campaigns. Additionally, those engagements need to evolve beyond the contest, sweepstakes, give- away model to deliver a truly meaningful experience. The best way to explain my point is with an example: Oreo recently launched a campaign called the Oreo Daily Twist. Each day Oreo took a sometimes fun and at other times quite politically risky approach of visually refashioning their iconic cookie to be relevant to a news level topic of the day. The campaign was successful on many fronts: it was time relevant, it was news relevant, it was at times risky and political and it understood the nature of it's social community and their willingness to support and engage with the effort. Additionally the end consumers had a thoughtful and interesting experience, of the sort they had never experienced before with the brand. The singular nostalgic message of a childhood cookie and cup of milk was nowhere to be found yet the campaign succeeded wildly. The brand listened to the data, used it effectively and the end consumer had a relevant, engaging and thoughtful experience. Truly, what we call a 'win- win.'.
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