Prompt's TechBlog

The CIPR has published its guidelines for social media.

The CIPR is the industry body for public relations and Prompt is a corporate member. The new guidelines apply CIPR's ethics rules for public relations to emerging social media, including blogs, online communities and social bookmarking tools.

The new policy says that it should be made clear where a blog is run almost entirely without detailed oversight by its public face. That effectively bans unsupervised ghost-written blogs, since you can't use a byline that says 'By our CEO (Not really)'.

Astroturfing, where somebody fakes a grassroots movement online, is also out. Contributing to wikis is allowed within the wiki's own rules.

All of that seems sound. However, there's one guideline that I am not convinced is headed in the right direction. CIPR recommends that any member running a personal blog, whether it deals with PR or not, should say they work in public relations. What's more, the guidelines say this should extend to any comments left on other blogs too.

So, say I'm at someone's blog and I want to disagree with their choice of the best pop singer of the 80s. I'm supposed to leave my comment, together with a statement 'I work in public relations'.

As you know, Prompt only does technology PR, so there's no link between the comment and my work. But the unnecessary disclosure creates the suspicion that there is. In the same way, if I want to set up a blog about building cool stuff with Lego, the whole thing would be undermined if I had to put a statement on it saying I work in PR. People would assume I was writing to sell bricks, not just for the love of it, even though I have no link to the Lego company.

I'm in favour of full disclosure, but we need informed disclosure. Where it's irrelevant, the disclosure itself can be misleading and can undermine the creative works that PR professionals make in their spare time. Not everything they do is related to the job. There is life outside the office.

PR professionals are perfectly capable of judging where there's a conflict they need to disclose, both on their own blogs and in comments. They don't need a rule that's so far-reaching to help them err on the side of caution.