Category: Business Ethics

By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Business Ethics, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies

Respect your prospect’s intelligence! It’s one of the points I make repeatedly in Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First–and with good reason. To succeed in business, you need long-term relationships. And you don’t get them by insulting people.

I could list bad-practice examples from now until the end of time. Every once in a while, I find one that just pisses me off because it seems to shout, “Hey, Stupid! Send us money!” The one that landed in my postal mailbox today was one of them.

It was a plain, typed envelope–with a sprayed barcode and a nonprofit bulkrate stamp. No return address.Yeah, I opened it–after all, Google’s AdSense checks can’t be identified from the outside.

Inside, a post-it with this text in a very UNconvincing handwriting font:

Shel,
have you
seen this?
Brian

Yes, three lines of text all lined up, and the name about under the question mark.

The sticky note was attached to (and amazingly precisely lined up with) a piece of newsprint. The front had an ad for a charity I’ve heard of but don’t contribute to. The back was a fake news story about the same charity.

No clue about who Brian might be, except that the fake article mentions the CEO’s first name happens to be Brian.

So just how stupid does this charity think I am? Am I supposed to be fooled into thinking this is from someone I actually know? That despite the bulk stamp and barcode, I was individually selected? Does a “news story” with no byline, no identifier about the paper it might have ran in? Or that the article and the ad just happened to be back-to-back and fit perfectly with no wasted space? Puh-leeze! Stopping only to be humiliated in this blog post, this mailing goes straight to the recycle bin.

Why, after all these years, do marketers continue to write, design, and distribute this crap? Do they really think we’re going to be fooled? Do they actually want dumb-as-a-slug contributors or customers who won’t ask embarrassing questions?

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics-International, Media Ethics, Transparency vs. Secrecy, Uncategorized, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , , ,

If you search on Google for the word Google plus the exact phrase “Don’t Be Evil”, you get 366,000 hits. The company’s motto has been used at least since 2001, according to Wikipedia.

As someone who has been writing and speaking about business ethics for seven years, I applaud this motto. But I question its authenticity as it applies to some of Google’s actions. In other words, I see Google occasionally violating the motto with at least three sets of policies that–intentionally or not–certainly do evil.Read more »

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Energy & Sustainability Tagged with , , ,

Fascinating interview with Jonathan Porritt, long-time environmental activist and outgoing environmental advisor to UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

I find this statement particularly worthy of discussion, and would love to hear what y’all think on this:

Still, he says there are also too many examples of corporate responsibility deployed by companies with fundamentally amoral business models that cannot stand up to scrutiny. He says a particularly stark example is the UK banking industry.

The corporate responsibility teams of UK banks have strong reputations, he says. “They were seen as extremely professional parts of those financial institutions … who used to win lots of awards.

“But the reality is they never, ever got close to the business model of those banks. They were never given access to the decisions being taken about changing the investment strategy, about rethinking approaches to risk, or about the balances of portfolio or a different approach to asset management.”

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Publishing

While going through the claiming process in the Google Books settlement (if you’re an author, you should do so too–by tomorrow!–so you get royalties if they sell your stuff, or can opt out), I discovered that my very first book, co-authored with a well-known NYC literary agent and a subject-matter expert, had been published as a paperback in the UK, by a different company, the same year the American hardback edition came out.

The book was published 29 years ago, and I never knew this. I wrote to my literary agent co-author, and he didn’t know about it either.

And a few years ago, I discovered that the publisher of my third book, published in 1993, had quietly put it back into print as an on-demand title, meaning they print one when someone orders it. Again, I was not told. In that case, I was pretty sure I’d gotten a reversion of rights, but the paperwork seems to have been lost when I moved in 1998. In that case, I was deeply opposed to putting the book back in print because I had actually written a much more comprehensive and more recent book. But since I couldn’t locate the note I’d received several years earlier, I couldn’t do much about it.

Don’t authors have rights in these situations? Shouldn’t a publisher be obligated to not only notify an author but actually obtain consent? Grrrr!

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Energy & Sustainability Tagged with , , , ,

Since John Wiley & Sons is publishing my next book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet (co-authored with Jay Conrad Levinson), I was very pleased this morning to discover a press release about its first sustainability/responsibility report.

Wiley’s press release includes ten accomplishments for the fiscal year just ended, addressing everything from responsibly sourced paper and lower paper consumption to carbon control to social outreach in its headquarters town of Hoboken, New Jersey–and eight goals for the current year, focused on broadening its impact beyond its own corporate borders.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics in Government, Ethics-International, Ethics: General Tagged with , , , ,

Exactly how did Bernie Madoff steal his billions? Why are Halliburton’s hands so dirty? What happened with corruption cases in the rebuilding of Iraq? Following a link from EthicsWorld’s e-newsletter, I came to a single URL that has multiple stories on corruption: https://www.ethicsworld.org/publicsectorgovernance/corruptioninvestigations.php#sec.

This is what we’re up against, those of us who believe in ethics.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Media Ethics, Politics, Transparency vs. Secrecy

What an outrage! If there is a PR equivalent of disbarment, Bonner & Associates would be a candidate.

As U.S. Rep. Tom Perriello was considering how to vote on an important piece of climate change legislation in June, the freshman congressman’s office received at least six letters from two Charlottesville-based minority organizations voicing opposition to the measure.

The letters, as it turns out, were forgeries.

“They stole our name. They stole our logo. They created a position title and made up the name of someone to fill it. They forged a letter and sent it to our congressman without our authorization,” said Tim Freilich, who sits on the executive committee of Creciendo Juntos, a nonprofit network that tackles issues related to Charlottesville’s Hispanic community. “It’s this type of activity that undermines Americans’ faith in democracy.”

You can read the newspaper article here If you prefer audio. Democracy Now covered this today (briefly) as well.

I make a good part of my living as a Pr copywritier and marketing strategist, and I’m totally appalled. I also note that all the press coverage I’ve seen points out that this particular firm has a long history of “astroturfing,” which casts suspicion on the claim that this was an accident. I don’t know how you forge a letter from an imaginary person on someone else’s official letterhead—twice!—and call it an accident. I also don’t know how you can run a PR agency for decades for 25 years and not think that the Public Relations Society of America Code of Ethics has any relevance to you.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Transparency vs. Secrecy, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , ,

I just answered a reporter query about sponsored blogs and sponsored tweets–specifically whether they should be disclosed. And that led me to meditate on the question of whether it is ethical to ghostwrite tweets and blogs for other people.

I have a very clear opinion on both of these scenarios. But I’m going to shut up and see what y’all think, for a few days, and then I’ll tell you my thoughts, and the reasons behind them.

What do you think?

1. Should a blogger or tweeter disclose sponsorship?
2. Is it ethical to ghostwrite blogs and tweets?

To keep the lawyers happy: unless you specifically state otherwise, posting your response gives me the nonexclusive right (but not the obligation) to quote you in an article, blog post, and/or book

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics-International, General Commentary, Politics, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , ,

Pope Benedict XVI’s third encyclical is a sweeping, 144-page document addressing and interlocking a wide range of social issues. He calls on the financial industry to tame its greed and turn to ethics, asks the United Nations and individual governments to address deep-rooted poverty issues–not only from economic development perspectives but also making sure these countries have a voice and a seat at the table of power–a political shift, in other words.

Good coverage in the Washington Post (see above link). And a shoutout to Allan Holender of the World Wide Association of Zentrepreneurs, for bringing this important document to my attention.

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