One of the main points PRweek introduced this week was that fake blogging, ‘flogging’ is likely to be made illegal when the EU’s Unfair Commercial Practices Directive passes into UK law at the end of this year. As the article notes “The directive prohibits unfair commercial practises including falsely claiming or creating the impression that the trader is not acting for purposes relating to this trade, business craft or profession or falsely representing oneself as a consumer.”As I have pointed out earlier in this blog, Edelman was revealed as ‘floggers’ for Wal-Mart last year. They got away with an apology, but this new law is suggestion prosecution and exposing of names for people who breach the law. Matthew Yeomans (founder of Custom Communications) argues that if blogs are honest, they can provide huge advantages to the brand. On the other hand, if they’re not, they can be very damaging. No one likes being lied to, and if you are revealed people wants to see you punished.
This is an important debate. I think there definitely should be some kind of guidelines in how far you can go in promoting a client. I’m not sure if PR has to be transparent in every field of the work. Sometimes you might have to twist the truth in order to achieve the best results. However, I don’t think deliberately lying and changing identity are ethical ways to succeed.
2 comments:
It will be really interesting to see how this whole law is policed. The beauty and pitfall of the internet is that things like blogs and consumer reviews are often consumer-regulated. People know when they are being lied to.
I think that it will be more of a guideline for companies, not a law that will ever bring a corporation to prosecution.
Good post.
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