Contemporary Advertising 14th Edition by William Arens ,Michael Weigold ,Christian Arens

تمرين 4

What happens when unregulated meets anonymous Welcome to public relations in the Internet age.
PR practitioner Todd Defren raises several real-world digital public relations ethical issues in his blog "PRsquared." In one, Defren asked "What would you do if a client contact-who had a pretty solid Twitter following-asked you to tweet from his account as if you were him Crazy Wrong Unethical?"
Defren raises the same issue about a corporate blog. He refers to the practice of a PR agency writing unattributed posts for a client as "ghostblogging." "You can rail against it as a black mark against authenticity," notes Defren, "but it is happening and it is a trend that will only grow. Not enough people see this as a bright line separating 'good' from 'bad'...
And speaking of blogs, how ethical is it to pay people to give a brand or company favorable coverage The site "payperpost.com" encourages visitors to "Make money blogging! PayPerPost lets you pick your advertisers, name your own price and negotiate your own deals. You can get paid to blog on virtually any subject. Sign up below!" How credible would you find such posts if you knew they were sponsored?
Even big brands are getting in on the game. Coach collaborates with bloggers, even asking them to appear in its ad campaigns.WWD.com quotes David Duplantis, executive VP of global and digital media, as saying "We see bloggers as editors, influencers and entrepreneurs who reach a very specific and unique audience. We find great value in working with those who are relevant to our brand, and are willing to pay fairly for projects." Duplantis believes that while Coach benefits from bloggers, the bloggers in turn benefit from working with a brand as important as Coach. But how do consumers benefit if they are unaware of a brand-blogger relationship?
The analyst firm Forrester thinks it's smart for companies to pay bloggers to engage in "sponsored conversations." Marshall Kirkpat-rick at ReadWriteWeb.com disagrees, noting "We respectfully disagree with Forrester's recommendations on this topic. In fact, we think that paying bloggers to write about your company is a dangerous and unsavory path for new media and advertisers to go down."
Maybe all of this has convinced you that if you are looking for advice, you might want to skip blogs. Better to use a search engine, like Google, that can deliver search results that reflect the wisdom of millions of consumers. But what if a company tried to take advantage of Google's search engine JC Penney decided it would try. Thousands of fake pages were created featuring key words valuable to the store. The initiative was designed to take advantage of Google's PageRank system and send shoppers to Penney's website. Not illegal, certainly. But ethical Google eventually intervened and made it less likely Penney's results would show up in "organic" search.
But if Google polices Penney's, who polices Google The company admitted that it paid bloggers to promote its Chrome browser. Dailytech.com reported that Google indicated it had "investigated" and that it would be "taking manual action to demote www.google.com/chrome and lower the site's PageRank for a period of at least 60 days." Maybe all of this seems so frustrating to you that you've resolved to stick to Twitter, where at least you can judge a source's credibility by observing the number of followers that the individual or group has. After all, millions of followers can't be wrong. Unfortunately, the number of "followers" of a Twitter source may be very misleading, because sources can actually buy followers. The New York Times and USA Today reported recently that up to 70 percent of Barack Obama's followers, and 71 percent of Lady Gaga's, are "fake" or "inactive."
The Web is an evolving medium, and companies are searching for ways to profit from it. The history of advertising suggests that consumers will reject companies that try to take advantage of them unfairly, unethically, or dishonestly. That is something every brand manager might want to keep in mind.
Do any of the activities described above strike you as unethical Why?