Social media is “new territory for PR,” sez PRSA. BS, sez me.
Food giant ConAgra and its PR firm Ketchum found itself in a reheated soup recently, when an event for bloggers in which food bloggers were fed frozen dinners as a “secret surprise” went wrong. At least some of the bloggers took offense, and a retreat was hastily beaten.
The story is an interesting one, as written by Andrew Adam Newman in the New York Times. But I was most interested in the quotes by PRSA ethics expert Deborah A. Silverman.
Here’s what Newman’s story closed with:
The promotion was “unfortunate” and “struck me as being not quite where they should be in terms of honesty,” said Deborah A. Silverman, who heads the Board of Ethics and Professional Standards at the Public Relations Society of America.
In an e-mail message, Ms. Silverman added, “Ketchum has an excellent reputation for high ethical standards,” but “the social media realm (including bloggers) is new territory for public relations practitioners, and I view this as a valuable learning opportunity.”
Does PR need a social-media Lewis and Clark?
I have some issues with this. First, Ketchum’s “excellent reputation” has at least one gigantic hole in it in the shape of Armstrong Williams. I wrote about the Armstrong Williams scandal when it happened in 2005. It stank then and it stinks now.
They’ve also been sharply criticized for their use of Video News Releases (VNRs) — criticism serious enough to cause PRSA to issue a bulletin about their ethical usage.
Second, the idea that social media and blogger relations are “new territory for public relations practitioners” is hokum and hooey.
A quick Google on blogger relations found articles from Lee Odden in 2006 and John Cass in 2007 on doing blogger relations right. Neville Hobson wrote an article for IABC’s Communication World magazine in May 2006 about blogger relations (I’m not a PRSA member, so don’t have access to their resources as I do IABC’s). I pointed to some guidelines from Cory Doctorow in 2008 on this blog.
I asked Deborah Silverman, who is a PR prof at Buffalo State in New York, if she wanted to expand on her view, and she did. Here’s her response:
“The social media realm, including bloggers, is relatively new territory for public relations practitioners, as evidenced by the large crowds who attend social media workshops. Social media have been around for only about five years. Although many practitioners may be familiar with social media, there are numerous new ethical issues that are arising; one of those is where bloggers fall within the consumer-advocate-journalist continuum. So I do believe that this situation was a learning experience for all of us. Above all, it reiterates the ethical tenet in PR that disclosure of motivations, intentions and/or sponsorship is paramount.”
First, it’s unfortunate that Silverman chose not to respond to the concerns over Ketchum. Second, I disagree with her on a number of points. First, the fact that social media training attracts crowds doesn’t necessarily mean it’s new. People still go to speechwriting workshops and speeches aren’t new; people learn to write news releases and the news release is more than a century old. And while this may be a “learning experience” for Silverman, ConAgra, and Ketchum, I think a lot of social media practitioners only learned a new way to screw up blogger outreach.
One could be charitable and say that it’s too soon to REALLY know how to do this. But it’s not true. There’s no reason to not know how to do this well, and to do it.
May have more about these issues soon.
UPPERDATE: Tonia Ries at the RealTime Report has more thoughts and references related to this story, as does the always readable Jen Zingsheim at Media Bullseye.
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Piling on a little of what Lucretia said re: SM and it’s history. Blogging is one component, but SM as it stood before it was given a nifty title for the masses to grasp was doing just fine long before Netscape 1.0. Delphi Forums were huge then and still exist today. They really laid the groundwork for everything we do today. User groups have been around as long as I can remember (and we can probably credit everything back to CompuServe). All of them open. All of them public. All of it very social. Not to beat a dead horse, but the majority of PR folks aren’t historically ahead of the game, so I’m not surprised their beliefs of the social media birth coincides with it’s mainstreaming and is in lock-step with the media themselves. How many news outlets and PR firms were heavy into SM before Capt Sully ditched the plane in the Hudson?
What I don’t understand is why do you have to pull the Pizza Hut fake restaurant stunt? Don’t you think bloggers would feel more respected and part of the process if they were invited to try new food that was created with the goal of being as close to good as possible to fresh restaurant food? A simple “Can you try this?” would go a long way and eliminates any ethical issues. So many people, especially in our YouTube driven society, want to be part of something cool and noteworthy (the hidden restaurant trick) instead of being part of something smart that actually adds continued value over time. Where’s the patience?
Hi Bob – thx for the shoutout. I love your post, especially the legwork you did to get additional “clarification” from the PRSA. I don’t care if something is 5 years new, 10 years new (as @lucretia points out) or 5 days new. If you are a PR company that is getting paid to advise clients on best practices, you should not advise the client on anything if you’re not up to speed on the ‘latest’ best practices. Isn’t that why they hire you to begin with?
I can’t say anything more than… yup.
I’d comment. But ethics are just so, you know, NEW and all…
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Ned, Bob and others – Thanks for sharing your comments. Allow me to address a point some have made in the comments: PRSA is not saying that there is a “special set of ethics applicable to social media” or that there is a “third way” to think of ethics when engaging in social media, or with bloggers, citizen journalists or even someone on the street. We firmly believe in one big thing: that there is an ethical way to communicate with internal and external audiences. And that is through transparency and open and honest communications. Period.
Ms. Silverman’s broader point is one that the PRSA has been exploring — both anecdotally and through research — for quite some time: whether social media is creating, or has created, new ethical challenges for PR professionals that were not inherent in the past. In that regard, her point that the “social media realm (including bloggers) is new territory for public relations practitioners” has merit in that she is approaching this specific issue (e.g., the Ketchum campaign) from the standpoint of how it fits into the broader ethics in public relations discussion. Taken out of context, yes, that statement may not apply to all things PR and comms. But when considered within the context of this specific incident, we believe it is applicable.
Again, context is key. We wholeheartedly agree with those who have commented that “ethics is ethics.” I think our firm condemnation of unethical practices by public relations firms and practitioners in recent months (see here: http://bit.ly/pQFyO4 and here: http://bit.ly/ojxFOu … and here: http://bit.ly/klmVcd… and here: http://bit.ly/nyPgP0) attests to that. However, as I noted above, there is a broader and more nuanced consideration to consider. And that is that social media has absolutely altered the public relations profession, to the point where it is healthy for all of us to consider whether new ethical challenges are arising and whether we need to modernize and enhance our ethical standards to address those challenges.
Keith Trivitt
Associate Director of Public Relations
Public Relations Society of America
I believe you (whether that’s you, Keith or you, PRSA) and I are not going to agree on this. Given that I can find a plenitude of resources, case studies, and guidelines going back YEARS on blogger outreach and on blogger outreach ethics (Ogilvy was publishing blogger outreach ethical guidelines in 2007 – http://blog.ogilvypr.com/2007/10/the-ogilvy-pr-blogger-outreach-code-of-ethics/), this is not a “gee, this is all new” situation. This is a “Gee, we really didn’t think this through very well” situation.
Excellent article, Bob!
If you speak to Ms. Silverman again, can you pass along a message for me?
With regard to her utterly absurd assertion that: “Social media have been around for only about five years.” It would be lovely if you could let her know that social media have been around for several decades now.
The term “blogging” was coined in 1994. By 1999, there were several choices of “blogging software” (OpenJournal, LiveJournal, Blogger and more) that enabled people to post blogs, comment on them, and interact with pretty much the same basic functionality as they have now. The history blogging alone predates her 5 year estimate considerably. The history of “new media” which is now oftentimes referred to as “social media” and sometimes as “user generated media” is considerably longer and deeper. Depending on who you ask, email & BBSes were the first true “social media” as they allowed the same digital sharing of content & news on a many-to-many basis rather than the traditional one-to-many basis of “mainstream media” or “traditional media.”
I know that she’ll want to update her knowledge before misrepresenting that to any students.
Meanwhile, I have to ask – did she even bother to read the link you posted above on this blog? You know, the one that was posted in 2005 – back when you were writing about PR here 6 years ago. What kind of time machine did you use to get back there and post before the birth of social media?? *gasp!*
All sarcasm aside – am I the only one who worries that people like Ms. Silverman are teaching this to future PR professionals? Because I spend enough time disabusing digital immigrants of this “social media is new and scary and uncharted waters!” tripe. As evidenced by a conversation I recently had with a currently enrolled student? The digital natives have been using this technology for most of their lives – if you try to tell a 20 year old it’s “brand new” when they’ve never known a time without the world wide web? They write everything else you say off as coming from an ill-informed source.
Lucretia, I didn’t share that link with her before the post went up, although in an e-mail exchange I mentioned the Armstrong Williams case to her.
OOPS – I didn’t realize that one of the names was a hot link to the NY Times article. Now that I’ve read it, I’d like to amend my comments just a tad.
First, Bob, you did provide the background info (but like ConAgra, you hid it ) – when I figured that out, I wanted to take back that critique. However, you still didn’t take a stand on the ethics of this situation.
I’m not sure, having read it, that “ethics” are involved – instead, I think this is more about being brain-dead. By that I mean Ketchum took a group of people who they selected because the people themselves think of themselves as journalists, then they were treated as if they were opinion-leader consumers. There’s no problem with the bait-and-switch food thing with consumers – it’s been done so many times that if I was invited to a tasting, I’d at least be suspicious.
However, you’d never bring in a group of restaurant reviewers from the dead-tree media and do that bait-and-switch … you would KNOW (and Ketchum should know this) that they’d react badly, if only because food and restaurant critics are generally snobs who think they’re better than “folks” and who intentionally set themselves up to judge others.
So Ketchum showed serious professional mal-practice of the brain-dead variety in moving forward with this – I think Shankman alluded to this as well, though in different terms.
My bottom line – now that I know what happened – is to rule this out as an ethical breech – it wasn’t – but instead, it was a market-selection breech. They should have either picked people who like food and used them for commercial purposes, or they should have invited bloggers and told them “half of you will get real Italian restaurant food, half of you will get Marie Calendars’ slop, and we invite you to guess which group you’re in” … that would have been smart disclosure and would have avoided the ascerbic comments and generic pampered-pet outrage of the bloggers.
But this wasn’t about ethics. It was about I.Q.
Ned in Vegas
Ned Barnett recently posted..Building Your Business or Professional Practice through Effective Social Networking
Bob
I have so many issues with PRSA on this that I don’t know where to begin – but, well, let’s start at a core issue. Ethics are Ethics. There is not one set of ethics applicable to dealing with the producers at Fox Business or CNBC and another set for dealing with editors at the Wall Street Journal or BusinessWeek. The same holds true for Social Networking. IF you choose to treat bloggers as if they are members of the news media, then ethics which apply to the news media apply to them. IF you choose to treat bloggers as a particularly vocal sub-set of the public at large (i.e., as thought leaders or opinion leaders), then the ethics which apply to consumers apply to them.
There is no “third way” – no special set of ethics applicable to social media.
This, as a larger issue, has bedeviled social media for more than a decade (the PRSA gal says that the issue has been around for five years – since I’ve been actively blogging since 2004, and I was a late adopter, I can’t figure out her math – but the Internet-as-media goes back at least as far as Drudge and Lewinsky and Clinton and Isikoff – and that’s a lot more than five years).
Anyway, I’m sorry you didn’t explain what the problem was, Bob – I’d like to know, and I’d be glad to comment. And while you raised the issue of ethics, I’m not sure how you actually stand on it. So more in this blog would have been welcome. But what you did say clearly, on that I clearly agree with you.
So, tell us more?
Ned
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