Mulling over the social media ethical issues

The worldwide web is often thought of as an online platform where people can blast away their thoughts at random. Certainly enough people have gotten in trouble with this, due to inappropriate posts regarding their personal lives, which have cost people their jobs. Although many employers warn individuals about making dodgy posts that may come back to haunt them, it's sometimes easy for those same employers to turn the other cheek when they are paying their social media "gurus" to make some other very trust-damaging faux-pas' as way to generate leads.

According to Forbes' contributor, David Vinjamuri, some common mistakes that companies make are:

1. Unreported endorsements (i.e., the company pays a blogger or tweeter to recommend the company, but neither the blogger nor the company ever disclose the compensatory arrangement)
2. Improper anonymity (e.g., false online reviews, posted like from a third-party, to either endorse one's product or to bash one's competitor)
3. Compromising consumer privacy (e.g., Facebook's ever-changing privacy settings that make it hard to control what people outside of one's close network see; or Google's GMail changed privacy settings, that mines your e-mails for business analytic purposes)
4. Overly enthusiastic employees (i.e., employees endorsing the company on their own time, but forgetting to mention that they're associated with and/or employed by the company)
5. Using the online community to get free work (i.e., posting an invitation to fans to contribute their artistic work and creative and innovative ideas to help endorse the company or product, without compensating the creators of those ideas for their work, which may or may not be later incorporated into a traditional advertising campaign)

I think Forbes was spot on for all of these points, because they really do work to actually create resentment against a company. As people learn that Facebook publishes their information, which they had thought was private, those same consumers choose to remove themselves from the Facebook network, or at least to use Facebook more infrequently. This distrust and change in consumer behavior also has a domino effect: as F-commerce (or social media commerce, powered through sites like Facebook and Google +) increases, it is important that people have loyalty to their favorite websites and brands, especially their social media platform of choice, because should those individuals be scared away from engaging with web communities using those sites, businesses will in effect also lose business if they start relying upon social media platforms to generate the business leads.

Moreover, it is dangerous for companies to become lazy or overly-advantageous with social media,  because their competitors may also find their faux-pas, and they could all of a sudden be faced with a smear-campaign, like that which Microsoft recently published online (see video on left), in regard to the "corrupt GMail Man." Because Google changed its privacy policy in a very vague fashion, Microsoft took their opportunity to create an online discussion about what had happened in the form of funny videos that not only bashed GMail, but that also promoted Microsoft Office 365.

Therefore, it is important to be aware of the message one is giving off when he or she posts on social media sites, especially if that someone is working for a company, and that what he or she says could be misconstrued to be promoting a product or company or slandering the name of the company's competitor. Indirect problems of this sort are commonplace, and it's much better for long-term growth and success over the Internet to be aware of what the do's and don'ts of social media are, before you cost your company big time by making the single self-deprecating post or decision that could crumble your business.