Altyrian View

In a survey released by LRN Corp. and reported here, corporate ethics is important to workers and affects their productivity. From the article:

Eighty-two percent of a group of 834 full-time employees surveyed across the country said they would work for less to be at a company that had ethical business practices, and more than a third said they have left a job because they disagreed with the actions of fellow employees or managers.

As PR pros, we can’t just make sure our clients are acting ethically, we have to make sure that we are talking about it with our employees. Hopefully, the companies for which we work are ethical – at least at the top. We have to communicate that all the way to the bottom.

A group of influential bloggers (including Shel Holtz who posted this message on his blog) and PR practitioners are supporting an anti-astroturf campaign.

If you don’t know what astroturfing is, here’s the definition from Wikipedia:

In American politics and advertising, the term astroturfing describes formal public relations projects which deliberately seek to engineer the impression of spontaneous, grassroots behavior. The goal is the appearance of independent public reaction to a politician, political group, product, service, event, or similar entities by centrally orchestrating the behavior of many diverse and geographically distributed individuals.

Great idea. We need to raise awareness about this underhanded practice.

Unfortunately, this isn’t a new phenomenon. The 2000 PRSA code of ethics mentioned astroturfing (though not by name) in one of the “Code of Provisions” (Disclosure of Information). I’d be surprised if other professional organizations don’t have the same.

So, why now? If you’re the one at your company that gets the PR resumes, you know the reason. There are tons of people entering the field – not just students but also second-career individuals who think that the grass is greener in our jobs (no pun intended). Sure, there are some unscrupulous people who know that astroturfing is bad, but I’m willing to believe that many of these well-meaning individuals don’t know any better – or if they do, they don’t have the confidence to say no to their boss / client.

Yes, it’s our responsibility to work honestly with our clients and our publics. It’s also our responsibility to educate new practitioners as to the ethical do’s and don’ts of our profession. It’s campaigns like this that help. Hopefully lots of people will blog about it and talk about it at professional meetings. In the end, working ethically does keep the grass greener in our profession.