Robin Carey, CEO of Social Media Today, spoke at this year's WOMMA Summit in Las Vegas prior to her onstage conversation with Tom Cherniak, founder of CMP.LY. The session title was:
Ethics and Disclosure Best Practices to Better Manage and Measure Blog and Social Influencer WOM Initiatives
Ethical Content Marketing
Francis Fukuyama wrote a book called Trust: the Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity. He's been accused of being culturally biased, and it's probably true. But his particular cultural value, which is creating trust because it's good business, is one that I think really is relevant to Social. I invite you to read that book because if, for no other reason, chances are your client - or you - have a CEO who is equally as right of center as Francis Fukuyama, and you can go and quote Fukuyama to get more support for a more trustworthy and ethical program in your marketing.
Obviously ethical content marketing is also faster, and it goes without saying that "fast" is important to Social. I don't know how many of you have been in a Middle Eastern bazaar, but one of the real charms of being in the bazaar is that it takes forever to buy something - if you play the game. And although it's culturally important there, I'm not sure if that's what the attention-deprived people who are engaging with you socially are going to want to do, too.
And then there's always the regulatory environment where you have the oversight of federal agencies like the FDA. I don't know if any of you are dealing with Pharma issues, but the FDA is particularly stringent about online marketing. We have a client who sponsors one of our sites on health care, and you would not believe how difficult that is, even though our sites are editorially independent, the compliance that we have to enact in order to be able just to get those blog posts out the door is really stringent. And if you work at anything to do with Pharma, financial services - you know what we're talking about. It's one thing to be ethical, but it's another to have an embedded conflict with your legal department when it comes to a regulatory environment.
Tom's going to talk about this more, but another reason for being ethical is that ultimately you'll get caught and there are tons of examples out there are of the implications of unethical online social behavior, because inevitably, it will come around, someone will call you out, then you're going to have to deal with the consequences.
Why Blogger Transparency?
So, this is all "Duh," right? There's nothing particularly revolutionary about this, and what we're going to do - Tom's going to take you through some more specific case studies that support these notions, but I think it's also important to look at why this doesn't happen, why ethical marketing? Why blogger transparency? And content that is truthful doesn't always see the light of day.
Is anyone else a fan of The Good Wife? Thank you. I don't know if you're also a fan of Eli Gold. I love this man. There was an interesting episode about 4 or 5 weeks back where he was in direct conflict with the lawyers of his firm - he runs the crisis management side of what they do. And there was a client - a big food services company - which was caught selling contaminated food to school children. Crisis management says, "Good rules of PR: get it out there, get the CEO, get the executives talking about it, transparently right away. You got a 24/7 news environment, the people are tweeting..."
The lawyers said, "Uh-uh. You cannot say certain things because it is going to get you in jail." And I know when you guys go back to your agencies and to your corporations, you're going to fight this battle. And all of us can only do so much within a regulatory framework that really dampens creative expression.
This is something I'd like to leave you with and then I'm going to throw it over to Tom.
You Are Now a Media Company
Tom Foremsky - I don't know how he's known to you - blogs on Valley Reporter and is a great guy and friend of our sites. He's been talking the last couple years about how "Every company is now a Media company." And you guys are now media companies. So ethical blogging no longer just has business value - the Francis Fukuyama idea - it actually has a moral imperative.
And again...you can shoot the jerk who's standing here talking to you about Moral Imperatives. (And who wants to go into the weekend with that bs?) But I think that - looking at these two pictures, I know you know the guy on the left - but the guy on the right is Bill Keller, formerly executive editor of the NY Times. It's too bad he's not here. I think Ashton Kutcher probably has a Klout score 4 or 5 times bigger than Bill Keller. This is a weird world we're living in. You've got to think of yourselves as being influential in a way that no one would have thought you before.
Randy Cohen, also formerly of The New York Times where he wrote the column The Ethicist for years, basically feels that - and he's in the Bill Keller camp - transparency is not enough. You can' t just put it up there. It's actually got to be verified by the trusted authority. And Randy Cohen would feel that there are only a few trusted authorities out there. It's not realistic.
Still, you guys have a special burden when you get back to your agencies and back to your companies - to make sure that the content that you produce is trustworthy. Because this is the world we live in and we can all fight about it, but certainly you've heard during the conference about content-based and influencer-based and word of mouth marketing - and talkable brands still applies, but is important in a different way. If you're going to be talking you've got to be transparent. But more than that, you've also got to tell the truth.
That's my sermon for the morning. Thank you very much.