I've never been proud about what I do for a living, pushing public opinion this way and that at the whim of my master. I was amazed the first time I learned that one could earn a degree in public relations, and despite the nurturing efforts of Ketchum Public Relations, I cast a sideways glance at something like a professional association. The work suits me because it isn't necessarily hard and people's lives rarely hang in the balance so I can go about my work in a relaxed fashion.
Be that as it may, I do keep an eye peeled for news about this line of work in an interest to stay abreast of the art and craft. And that leads me to a posting I came across today from the PRSA, the professional association I referred to above.
The name of the PRSA blog is...
...which is ok.
The headline that got my attention today is this:
What Does Ethics Have to do With Social Media Anyway?
... which is too clever for its own good. A million years ago, in a smokey little office in midtown Manhattan, Bob Walt taught me that if you write your press release with negative constructions and language, then your press release will have negative construction and language in it and that isn't at all what a press release is supposed to be all about. I think Mr. Walt caught me trying to write something along the lines of "We aren't satisfied with ordinary work here." And Mr. Walt correctly pointed out that it's much more direct if we were to write it, "We only do superior work here." --But I digress.
The problem with the headline, of course, is that if it were the only thing the gentle reader takes about from the PRSA blog posting about social media, the reader might suffer from the impression that the PRSA is trying to figure out if professional ethics apply to our work in social media. --And that would probably be bad.
But, dear reader, I didn't come to you again today with just one observation. The posting from the PRSA is chockablock with interesting items. Here are the first few sentences from the posting:
The principles and values in ethics are both universal and timeless. However, the applications of ethics change with time as societies evolve. How do we apply the basic ethics principles in the world of the e-mail, Internet, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and others? What is the difference between ethics in the real world and ethics in the virtual world? I see three major differences.
Speed. Things happen very fast in the virtual world. One click that will take less than one second
can cause irreparable damage, or even send you to jail!
Space. Or rather, the perceived space between the issuer and the receiver. People do things and say things on the Internet they would never do or say in person or in public. However, anonymity is an illusion. You can be tracked down at anytime.
Scope. You can reach millions of viewers.
I won't dwell on the exclamation point that follows the word jail. Suffice it to say that I rarely read past an exclamation point as it is usually an artifact of an over-stimulated author. But I will point out that the author does feel obliged to point out qualities of social media that have been Glaringly Obvious to most of us for at least the past ten years.
And speaking of the author's knack for calling out the Glaringly Obvious, we read on to a list of eight values the public relations professional should adhere to when working with social media. And value number one is...
1. Truth, Accuracy — Make a practice of posting factual content; don’t knowingly post/publish information that you know is false.
And that's where I stopped reading. I don't feel inclined to rehash the lessons I learned in Kindergarten. But before you mistake my feelings, I'm happy, Quite Happy, that the PRSA is there as our beacon for the profession. I'm just worried that the value set of a person is probably pretty well settled by the time someone graduates with a degree in public relations and takes a job as Canon Fodder at a respectable agency. And if they aren't...
