I am much more an optimist than a pessimist. I am happiest when I am championing something, not attacking it. I have passionate hot buttons that make me go over the top, as someone I admire recently wrote and I have more than once recently ignored Scoble's advice to not blog when I am in a bad mood.
The result is that this blog is getting cranky and I'm not happy about it. Naked Conversations was started to champion something, and to demonstrate the benefits of collaborating on the blogosphere. It has succeeded wildly toward those goals. Personal fears that our intellectual property would get stolen proved not to be the case.
In all this blog has reinvigorated my faith in people and the wisdom of crowds. I began this project as a reporter. Scoble was the visionary. And what has happened here exceeds his vision. Blogging is bigger than what even Robert thought. Social media is bigger than just blogging.
So why do I find myself railing these days at two categories of people. newcomers with clever ideas of how to corrupt blogging into something deceitful and companies who continue to ignore not only blogging, but the needs of their customers. To me, these two issues tie together under the umbrella of a single word:
Ethics.
I usually avoid discussion of ethics. Such talk often gets sanctimonious and also infers a smugness that mine are better than yours. My ethics have to do with what I do when no one is looking; whether I leave that juicy apple on the cart when the vendor is distracted. It's also about decisions made in backrooms about competitive pricing that requires shoddy goods where the customers cannot see them and about making the term "customer support" into an oxymoron. It's about earning trust, slowly, steadily over time.
Ethics is also not a term most people incorporate into their perceptions of marketing, PR and advertising. When I was studying Marketing 101 four score and seven years ago, we were taught that marketing is about relationships. This of course ties neatly into the concept that markets are conversations. If you can't see what those thoughts have to do with ethics, I doubt that anything I can say will help you see it.
There have been lots of questions lately from people asking "what wrong with..." questions on ethical issues." The truth is there is nothing for me to say in response. You either know the answer already or you don't. If you know the difference between what's ethical and what is not, then I hope you will change your strategies. If you do not, then I sincerely hope--for the sake of the rest of us--you will fail.
