After reading last week's case study on Ethics in Public Relations Campaigns, I found this blog post on the PRSSA website to be very applicable. It focused on something called astroturfing, which basically deals with employees or interns posting biased pre-scripted reviews on websites for their own company.
This blog post highlighted this subject matter by reviewing the recent case with the iTunes app store. Their PR firm, Reverb Communications used their interns to monitor the website and post positive reviews without mentioning the company they were affiliated with. According to a company called Techcrunch interns monitoring web reviews is a common practice, but this situation crossed the line of ethics.
According to the blog (and Wikipedia) astroturfing can be defined as, “formal political, advertising or public relations campaigns seeking to create the impression of being spontaneous ‘grassroots’ behavior, hence the reference to the artificial grass.”
Obviously, if interns were posting these comments they were not "spontaneous." I feel like this blog post directly paralleled to what I read about in the Ethics chapter of my textbook. Its pretty cool when you realize the things in your textbooks are real in the PR world too. The post gave a few other examples of unethical practices such as sneaking gift cards to sway bloggers, PR representatives in city council meetings and false opposition letters.
The final part of the blog post stressed the importance of our own personal ethics. Even as interns and young business professionals we need to be aware of how much this is going on and do our part to stop these unethical practices.
Hi. I was reading your September post and I would be interested to also read the case study on Ethics in Public Relations Campaigns that you were talking about in the first lines of this post.
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