Content Creation Ethics

When researching various issues about ethics and social media I came upon this article from forbes.com. This article gives details about the five deadly sins of social media and the ethics involved in them. The five sins according to the author are: 1 unreported endorsement, 2 improper anonymity, 3 compromising consumer privacy, 4 overly enthusiastic employees, and 5 using online community for free work. The fifth "sin" was something that caught my eye. The premise of this sin is that brands use contests where users submit their own creative content and the brands don't give enough compensation to the contestants for the amount of work they put into their entries.

I thought that this brought up an interesting issue in how much engagement should a brand take with its consumers. We have been talking about how brands should build strong relationships with customers and I believe that running contests for user created content is an excellent way to build a relationship, but at what point does exercising that strategy become unethical? The article says that most of the winners of these contests are freelance or unemployed, when brands run these contests but don't hire these artists that's when it becomes unethical. I think that is a very extreme opinion and one which i don't agree with. I think it is possible to run these kinds of contests and still be ethical. Take, for example, the following website.

A website that I visit which has literally taken this strategy of hosting user-content contests and turned into their core business strategy is shirt.woot.com. Every week a contest is run where users submit shirt designs based upon a theme. During the week users can vote on the designs they like the best and at the end of the week the top three designs are chosen for printing. Most of the profits from the sales of the shirts go to the designers with the rest going to shirt.woot. I think that this is a great way of ethically running user-content contests that not only provides a steady stream of content but also cash flow for both users and the website. I think it is entirely possible for brands to run contests with user created submissions in an ethical way.