6 posts tagged “ethics”

Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing reports that Jamba Juice's non-dairy goo contains grade a non-fat milk. No wonder they did not want to publish what was in it and made consumers jump through hoops to get their "secret" ingredients. I wonder if one asked their staff about milk, what they would have said? Probably, "hey, its non-dairy!"

A few items below is a bit on MS giving away laptops loaded with Vista to bloggers who are big enough, powerful enough, and willing to sell their credibility in exchange for favorable reviews of Vista (an operating system that TOTALLY screws up any computer with preexisting microslut systems on it) so they can get positive reviews.  B.L. Ochman points out, that once again, the three-ring whore master behind this caper is none other than Edelman, the folks who brought you the Wal-Mart flog.  

Well, not about music per se, but blog positively and enough and rank hign up and MS will pay you off for writing good reviews on Vista. As I posted on threadwatch, too bad the lawmakers won't climb all over this one. Of course the REAL question is, were you a blogger and you strongly suspected or knew that Microslut would pay you off for writing a good review and you did so to get the goodies, wouldn't that make you a whore? 

I understand this term better as a subset of disinformation in competitive intelligence. I like the name, but this is not a good thing. In disinformation we usually try to sow false leads for our competitors to follow - confusing the trail we are on, misleading them, causing them wasted time and money following false leads and so on. Defensive in nature, However, black pr is disinformation with a destructive bent - it is sowed with the intent of harming a competitor or adversary. Strumpette has a nice piece on black pr with information from Russia where firms commonly use "rumors and false information to quash their rivals. They also believe that this is the easiest and the most effective way to get the media's attention and onto their agendas," according to Ivana Kalay who is quoted by Strumpette. Also noted is that black pr is on the rise and being woven into broad-based communications as it spreads westward. 

StartupNation bloggers boast a bit about how getting on the telephone enabled them to collect competitive information. Here is an interesting quote from the blog:

"It helped that one of us was still a college student, but the long and the short of it is that people like to boast about their successes."

While boasting is the company's fault, if startupnation used the "student" card while concealing they were future competitors, then their ethics may certainly, and accurately, be challenged. 

Forward Blog reports on the UK's Chartered Institute of Public Relations' (CIPR) discussion paper concerning the ethics of ghost-written CEO blogs and the dangers they pose. You can download the discussion paper PDF here.