Yesterday I participated in the CSUS Symposium on Personal and Professional Integrity in Business. The event was excellent – it surpassed my expectations.
Superb business ethics forum at CSUS
Congratulations to Christina Bellon, Russell DiSilvestro, and the whole CSUS Philosophy Department on a job well done.
Rick Shubert introduced me, moderated, and paraphrased questions from the audience – the better to capture them on the video recording and clarify the essential point for speakers. I nominate Rick to moderate the presidential debates in 2012. Can I get a second?
Standouts in business ethics
I was thrilled to see colleagues, including Elisabeth Brinton, in the audience, when I offered my session, “The New Rules of Business Communications — Business Ethics and the Rise of Business Blogs.” My only regret is that, because of a client committment, I missed the morning keynote by Ed Hartman of the Stern School of Business at New York University.
Business blogging questions posed by the audience
In no particular order, here are some of the questions posed by the audience yesterday:
1. What can be done [in the blogosphere?] to recognize and support the authenticity of the individual voice?
2. What can be done to protest against false accusations online?
3. Do you think that the anonymity of online forums creates a tendency on the part of participants to fight against rather than for a cause? Do you think it gives rise to conflict-oriented interactions?
4. Do those in marketing have a robust fiduciary obligation to their employers or are they merely a means to their employers ends (so long as those ends aren’t evil)?
Slide deck: “The New Rules of Corporate Communications: Business Ethics and the Rise of Business Blogging”
To download a PDF of my slide deck, such as it is, click the image above or this link:
If you attended or have on-topic feedback, comments, or, please, for heaven’s sake, answers!, please use the Leave a Reply area below to chime in.
Rebekah,
Let me attempt to address your second and forth question.
Firstly, your second question. As I see it, victims of false accusations have two essential options – to act or to simply ignore the issue.
Should they choose to take action, the best course of action would be to simply place a short comment on the forum in which they correct or clarify the issue to which the accusation relates. Further, blog owners and forum moderators should expel or deny access to any user who is found to make such accusations on a continuous basis.
In response to your fourth question, I am not entirely certain that I understand your question correctly, but I believe that yes, marketing staff do have a fiduciary duty to their employer. As with all employees, marketing staff are accountable to their employers and must always act in the best interests of their employer provided such actions do not breach legal or ethical boundaries.
Andrew, you raise some great points here. Have you moderated in a forum where you needed to cut/prevent posts from some individuals? I’d love to hear an example – very interesting.
How would you articulate a business forum’s groundrules for comments — and should a moderator tell active forum participants that some posts are being filtered for their sake?
I don’t think I understood that fourth question either — my impression was that the asker was wondering about whether a ‘foot soldier’ should stand up to his higher ups if he’s asked to carry out some unethical practices. Ala the movie where the Tom Cruise lawyer character gets the Jack Nicholson general character court martialed for ordering soldiers to haze one another, perhaps?
When people are online, they definitely have a tendency to be ruder, meaner, and less civil to each other. The anonymity of the Internet and the security of writing on the computer screen seems to lead them to say things they would never say to a person’s face. So it’s only self-restraint and good manners that keeps us in check when the temptation to flame someone is so high. And that’s actually how I think we can recognize authentic and worthy voices. On the web, your words are all you have. So the blogger or the poster to chooses them carefully and who is aware of all the pitfalls, but still succeeds in making their case, is to be applauded.
As for false accusations, I can’t imagine that many people, especially the ones who have some online experience, would take many accusations very seriously. We all know that there are lots of kooks out there, and any idiot with a computer and a cable modem can post. So we have all learned to take a lot of what gets thrown around on the web with a grain of salt.
I’m also noticing among bloggers that a lot of them don’t actually have that much interesting content, but they really like the idea of having a popular, high traffic blog. So they will do a lot of work trying to get inbound links, and boosting their google ratings and traffic by any other means possible. My policy has been to not care much about traffic and just let the words speak for themselves. I figure if I am producing good, interesting, stimulating material (I seem to be–google: atheism, proving the negative), then the people will come. People are savy consumers for the most part and they can sense bullshit pretty readily.
Thanks Rebekah for presenting at CSUS last week. Your presentation was really informative and stimulating.
MM
Hi!
Nice Blog! Happy to keep following this!
http://vqrdkqjeoqtxpm.ods.org
Rebekah – Great presentation! The whole event was outstanding and such an important topic for today’s business climate. As the Financial Crisis continues to show us (by the disturbing lack of care and common sense), business ethics and integrity in both decision making and communication is vital for the health of our economy. Your talk was exciting because it points to where there is actually hope – on-line marketing and communication represent a place where authenticity and transparency seem to be thriving, because people are demanding it … maybe this same grass-roots consumer demand for truth-telling and fact checking will at some point push the quality of mainstream corporate customer service dialog forward as well?