Ethical Correctness

The issues regarding the ethical issues with social media are important to understand as a marketer and also as a social media user. Essentially you are advertising yourself online when you sign up to a social media website. It allows people to see photo’s of you even if you privacy settings are at their highest. For example if I was to type my name into Google it would come up with my facebook page.  Likewise facebook is available to everyone and anyone, only a few pieces of information required. You often hear about paedophiles stalking young girls and boys via facebook pretending to be somebody they are not.


Due to the increased awareness that people now have following the PR scandals of the inventors of facebook being taken to court after allegations that they were selling sensitive information onto big corporations. Boyd (2008) suggests that people have become more skeptical of the social media sites [1], which has lead to them increasing their privacy settings. Now it is well known that many employers check peoples social networking sites before employing them. Many people think it is unacceptable for employers to do this, what people do in their spare time is up to them. However employers argue that when you are an employee at their company you are representing the brand, therefor unequivocally associated with the company. Following PR scandals, many employers will make employees sign a clause regarding the do's and dont's of social networking sites [2]. 

The issue that marketers face when using something such as social media to promote campaigns, sometimes targeting becomes threatening. People want to be interested in what you have to offer but not to the extent that they start checking their bank statements for fear of identity theft. Facebook is to blame when the advertising is so directly targeted as they are the ones getting paid for these companies to have your information, what exactly are we getting from it? An occasional advert that we are interested amongst the traffic of adverts that quite frankly we don’t particularly care about. I feel that if a company is going to use the adverts within social media pages, please do us a favour and do it well.

But a brand doesn’t need to have an issue with ethics. Many brands use social media to enhance their corporate social responsibility. I think this is important not only for natural disasters affecting the millions, but also for the local community in which the corporation operates. This creates great PR for a company and will probably increase sales as a result, perhaps linking to the earlier blog discussing seamless brands, this should be a part of the process for a company to become faultless. 


[1] Boyd, D. (2008) Facebook's Privacy Trainwreck: Exposure, Invasion, and Social Convergence, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. Volume: 14, Issue: 1, Publisher: UNIVERSITY OF LUTON, Pages: 13-20
[2] http://www.fastcompany.com/1692172/how-social-media-and-big-brother-are-hurting-your-job-chances