Social Media Marketing and Ethics

"What is the difference between unethical and ethical advertising? Unethical advertising uses falsehoods to deceive
the public; ethical advertising uses truth to deceive the public."— Vilhjalmur Stefansson. Just when we were not
done badgering advertisements for being offensive and in bad taste, we have been overwhelmed by the new big
brother of marketing- Social Media Marketing “In today’s information age of Marketing and Web 2.0, a company’s
website is the key to their entire business”-Marcus Sheridan, author of The Sales Lion Blog Marketing Speaker.
Thus Social Media Marketing is the trend that has overshadowed all other marketing strategies. Simply put social
media marketing is the process of making your presence felt by generating website traffic and thus gaining attention.

If we see the above diagram the maximum focus is on making the presence felt on the social media
platforms which can be done through an increase in the content publishing.

Urmila Menon
How and why does it work? To quote the Facebook spokesperson “People share, read and generally engage more
with any type of content when it’s surfaced through friends and people they know and trust.”Social Media is
accessible to anyone and everyone who has access to the internet. It works because instead of companies blowing
their own trumpet they get their customers and other trusted third parties to vouch for them very nonchalantly.
Social media is not restricted to any age group so the customer base is also very vast

According to the above chart Facebook and Twitter are leading when it comes to social media tools. The scope of
this paper shall be limited to the leading tools –Facebook mainly and Twitter.

How do these tools work? If you have a large number of likes, followers or friends in your community, it does not
mean great business. It involves more smart work. The second level of ground work and the crux of it would be to
get your own customers talking about the venture. How do we get the customers talking? This could be done by
offering them freebies/offers if they post a picture of having a great time at say for example your eatery. Thus it
involves a lot of sublime symbiosis. It is also not limited to big companies who have the money and resource. Even
small companies who have a tech savvy person and networking skills can get the job done. This kind of marketing
requires a lot of virtual socializing, creativity and experimentations which has led to the growing breed of social
media marketing companies. These companies offer various media marketing services like consulting, profile
selection and development, relevant blog search, blog commenting campaigns, outreach program, brand
management, blogger outreach program and online viral marketing video campaigns.

Some of the challenges of the social media marketing are:

 Too Many Cooks: There are too many parties involved each with a motive to make their presence felt,
directly or indirectly and thus get monetary gains out of it. In the competitive process ethical border lines
get further blurred. As compared to the print and other counterparts of marketing, the social media
marketing is the toughest to monitor and safeguard since it is the network of the virtual world.
 Personalized Targets: In sites like Facebook there is a huge amount of personal data available. The social
media companies can easily link online behavior to physical locations. This has changed the face of
marketing. Micro-targeted ads were just the start, now companies can track one’s browsing habits and sell

Urmila Menon
 this information .If this change has benefitted marketing it will not be long before this is used in the fields
like politics and the likes .This can have grave social, political and legal repercussions.
 Mudslinging Fest: According to a blog in the Harvard Business Review,” the U.S. Congress turned up the
heat on Apple and Google after allegations that iPhones and Android-powered devices collect enormous
amounts of location data, even when users have switched off location-based services. Second, Facebook
admitted that it hired Burson-Marsteller, a leading global PR firm, to plant stories and editorials critical of
Google's data privacy practices, particularly as they relate to Facebook users' personal information."
 Impersonations: Another instance quoted in a blog spoke of an incident when a client who had a solid
following on Twitter asked his social media marketing company to tweet from his account when he would
be busy attending a show. He knew he would not be able to keep up with the list of ‘to dos’, at the same
time he did not want to miss out on making his presence felt by sharing his experience at the show. This
definitely put the social media company in an ethical dilemma as impersonation was not a part of their
contract. This situation was solved with a compromise, where the client would tweet that during the show
part of his tweets would be supplemented by his extended team. Thus covering any internal or external
team.
 The because of cause related marketing: The rise of ‘cause related marketing’ has also gotten murkier.
According to the Harvard Business Review, a lot of companies are partnering with not-for-profit
organizations in cause-related marketing campaigns. Though, these campaigns raise awareness, support and
donations for social causes such as global hunger relief, at the same time they enhance corporate
reputations, customer loyalty, and financial gains for companies which dilutes the cause and leaves room
for unethical ways. It ends up being a moral venture with its own dividends.
 Twitter litters: The magnitude of cheap publicity gimmicks online is massive because of the scale at
which it spreads. As rightly said by Tim O’Reilly & Sarah Milstein- co-authors of The Twitter Book,” The
biggest mistake we see companies make when they first hit Twitter is to think about it as a channel to push
out information.” Consider the example of Kenneth Cole -The high-end fashion label used the #Cairo
hashtag—which the rest of the world is using to follow the protests, to get some publicity for its spring
collection. This kind of insensitive and unethical ways go unpunished. The maximum repercussions would
be a lot of followers condemning and the accused person posting/tweeting an apology.
 Secure Mayhem: In times where “Confusion is the welcome mat at the door of creativity.” Or chaos is
considered order. The Facebook security measures are living up to the trend of change and confusion. The
security policies keep changing which leads to people ignoring security due to sheer frustration of the
myriad, volatile and complicated policies. The allegations quote that many sites visited via plug-in (such as
Like button, Recommend button) can reveal the users information without consent.
 Irreversible: Facebook also pushes its users into the sea of instant personalization without giving life
jackets if they want to revert back. For example there is no option to revert from the very public ‘Timeline’
to the older, much more in control version of Facebook. If you still insist on privacy then there are arduous
ways of going through your updates and hiding the ones you don’t want to be public. This could be quite a
venture if you have been a Facebook user for years.
We cannot bestow the entire blame on the networking tools like Facebook and the likes .We users also contribute to
these fiascos. We as users have an expectation that if it is available on the internet, it should be free. If the
networking site cannot extract money from us then it tries to piggy back ride the advertisers. But the advertisers will
not piggy back without a motive. Thus they get the precious sack of our highly personal information, the likes and
dislikes of millions of people in one go are transfused to them. So indirectly we are paying a price for our cheapness.

Urmila Menon
As the definition of privacy is fast changing for the user and the provider, it is high time there are some set
guidelines for the privacy settings for operating through the social media marketing platform. A tab must be kept on
the linking and other advertising arrangements. There should be an establishment of absolute clarity on the type,
amount of data that will be shared and IT policies and procedures should be established to enforce these. How do
applications access data and to what extent, must also be monitored. Thus keep the privacy settings simple and
uniform and consider all the possible loopholes. Ethics is tough to chalk out in a contract; it needs to be a way of
working if that doesn’t provide enough self restraint then think whether your company would be okay with featuring
on the front page for the planned unethical venture. That should hopefully stop the buck.
“We have embarked upon the world’s largest and longest cocktail party, and every issue imaginable is up for
grabs”- Geoffrey Moore, Author of Dealing with Darwin. Likewise the reputation of the success of social media
marketing is still up for grabs. If these boundaries are not figured out right now it will spill over to a lot of other
fields which will lead to a total mayhem which shall cripple the whole purpose of what was supposed to be a
widespread, flexible tool of awareness.

Urmila Menon