Fair is fair. Or is it?

Recently I attended PRSA Pittsburgh's Professional Development Day, which started off with a panel about PR ethics that included a local newspaper reporter. He raised an issue that provoked much discussion about the relationships between PR people and journalists: Is it ethical for a PR person to feed a story to one reporter over another, and if so, is there a right way and a wrong way to do it?

Here's the story the reporter told: He got a press release from a medical device maker about a breakthrough product, with the caveat that the story was embargoed, and the company wouldn't give him the information he needed until the embargo had lifted. But lo and behold, the following day, his competitor had the story, clearly spoon-fed by the company's flack.

That was unethical behavior, and to get at why, it's necessary to talk a little bit about embargoes, which most reporters hate, as do a fair number of PR people. In some situations they are, however, a necessary evil. Case in point: I used to work at Carnegie Mellon University, where one of my main duties was to promote scientific research published in peer-reviewed journals. Most of these journals imposed an embargo on stories about published research. The reason: Embargoes, it was believed, leveled the playing field, and took away a reporter's incentive to land a scoop. As a result, the thinking goes, all journalists covering the story will have adequate time to report on the research thoughtfully, and will be less likely to misrepresent it to the public.

The bottom line for me was that if I allowed a reporter to violate an embargo it would have damaged my institution's relationship with the journal, not to mention the researcher's relationship. But the reasoning behind embargoes is valid, and many public information officers at research institutions, particularly those that are public or receive large amounts of public funding, believe they have an obligation to keep the public informed about the work its tax dollars support. I admire them for it, and to the extent that they believe embargoes advance that purpose, I don't argue with them.

So back to our medical device maker, whose PR rep used an embargo not to ensure that the story would be reported accurately but to lull a reporter into backing off a story so their competitor would have a clear shot. That's deception, pure and simple; it's unfair and it was unethical.

But that doesn't mean that as PR practicioners we are required to treat all reporters equally. When I tweeted as much during the panel, Bryson W. Thornton of FedEx replied "Not equally but fairly." Fair is a slippery concept, and what a reporter regards as fair may not be the same as what a PR person thinks is fair.

Look, not all news outlets or journalists are created equal. Some publications have much larger readerships than others, even in the same market. Some journalists are more thoughtful than others, and are more likely to get the story right. And sometimes we know that handing a journalist an exclusive is the best way to guarantee that we get coverage with our strategic messages intact. I've done it, and it works, and I've been prepared to pay the price in the form of damaged relationships with the scorned reporters.

What I didn't do was lie about it, or use trickery to throw a reporter off my scent. To a journalist, it may be a distinction without a difference, but as a public relations officer, my job is to reconcile my client's or employer's interests with those of the public, and it is to those two entities that my obligations lie. The media is but a conduit between the two, and I must have some discretition over how I utilize it.

Truth to power

A recent Twitter exchange with @jgombita and @PR_in_Pink led me to this blog post about ethics in public relations. I don't have a lot of time to ruminate on it, but what intrigues me the most is the question of what is the role of the PR counselor in advising their employers/clients in how to conduct their business ethically?

As the late, great, Chester Burger said during a talk I was privileged to hear, the role of the public relations practicioner -- one of our roles, but an important one -- is to speak truth to power within an organization. I take that to mean that as PR guy, my job is to reconcile the interests of my organization with that of the public. And what that means is that the best form of public relations is good decision-making.

In other words, don't hire me just to clean up your messes. Hire me to help you avoid them in the first place.

Ashton, is that really you?

I belong to a handful of groups on LinkedIn, and one of them currently features a raging debate over the ethics of ghost-tweeting. On one side are those who say that writing tweets for another person -- say, a politician or a CEO -- is no different than writing their speeches, or a quote for a press release. Others counter that Twitter is more like a broadcast medium -- your followers are not reading the speech, they are listening to it, and it's dishonest to have someone else tweet for you.

There's little doubt that ghost-tweeting violates the ethos of social media, which places a premium on authenticity, transparency and direct engagement. Tweets, blog posts or Facebook updates that sound canned or overly commercial alienate friends and followers, and ultimately are self-defeating.

But that doesn't mean that ghost-tweeting is unethical. To me, the question rests on two criteria. Are you trying to deceive an audience by writing someone else's tweets? And is it likely that the audience will be deceived? Here it may be hard for public relations practicioners to discern whether their actions are fooling their audience. We're a bit more savvy, and cynical, about communications practices that many lay people. (Though plenty of us understand less about social media than the average user, I'll give you that.) To me, for example, it's obvious that a lot of politicians aren't actually tweeting in their own names. I don't expect them to, though I would certainly take notice if they did. (Imagine instead of a news conference, a politician holding a live Twitter chat. Does anyone know of someone who has done this?) But is this obvious to everyone? I'm not sure.

Another question to consider is whether a person is tweeting as their own personality, or as their brand. We expect a greater degree of intimacy from the former, and would permit greater formality from someone tweeting as their brand. For example, I follow Ralph Macchio on Twitter, and it's clearly him Tweeting. It would be skeevy if he got someone to start tweeting for him about watching baseball or going to concerts with kids. But Donald Trump is tweeting as Donald Trump the brand, and I have no expectation that he's sitting down with his iPhone and posting updates.

Part of the issue lies with the ambigious nature of Twitter, which Steven Johnson has described as a living, breathing search engine. That makes it a lot more like a news aggegator, Google with a pulse, than a social network in the spirit of Facebook. It's a lot harder to hide on Facebook. You can't have meaningful interactions without revealing some of yourself, which is why some people have a personal profile and others have a more sanitized and guarded "professional" profile. The former is available only to a few close friends and intimate associates, while the other is a convenience that lets them do business on Facebook without giving away too much of themselves. Facebook has also addressed this dilemma with groups and fan pages. I don't necessarily expect personal interaction out of a fan page that I follow, so it doesn't matter much if someone other than the celebrity maintains it.

Twitter, however, is much more spare, which allows users greater freedom to decide how to use it, and leaves any unofficial code of conduct or unspoken rules open to greater interpretation. Ultimately, what that means is that not all ghost-tweets are created equal -- or equally ethical.

The Jesus Kit Kat

I saved this a couple of weeks ago to view and never got around to it until tonight. I'm stunned. What do you think? I'm all for publicity stunts, but I just don't think outright deception is ethical. (Hat tip to the Web Strategist.)