Social Media and Ethics

Samantha Hamilton 

sh548815@ohio.edu

What do you think about the codes that guide advertisers and public relations professionals? Do they work, are they being followed? 

A company can use strategic communication when advertising, communicating new products, public relations or any entity in this advertising marketing area. Anywhere you can use a strategic process to create a verbal or written message to your audience. In this process the main goal to achieve is to inform the audience or persuade. Today, we are looking into the values and codes that organizations and companies follow that are written by the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) and the American Advertising Federation (AAF).


The main way you can use strategic communication to get a message to persuade your viewers in in the social media world. This is where most of marketing has seen rise in numbers and where they can reach the most people for certain companies and products. It is as easy as writing a little message less than 140 characters and hitting post and in minutes millions of people receive the message. It sounds very easy, but you need to make sure you have a specific strategic plan and what your message and vibe you want to give off on the social media platform. You also want to make sure that you are ethically right in everything that you post. This can become a huge issue and be hard to dig yourself out of since these days everything that you post is out there for everyone to see forever. This is even more true with big staple companies.



There is an issue arising of the term “fake news” which is has been an issue on multiple platforms now. The majority of the public still get their information and news from their favorite social media sites still. “About two-thirds of Americans get news on social media about most social media news consumers expect news there to be inaccurate.” (Pew Research Center)

https://www.journalism.org/2018/09/10/news-use-across-social-media-platforms-2018/pj_2018-09-10_social-media-news_0-01/

Being a part of the social world realm constantly I have seen many issues for companies following the ethic codes that are set for them to guide them. I feel that influencers are a huge fad right now that many different companies are following. If they can get someone like a Kardashian or Jake Paul. They get a company to contact them and want them to use their product. Then they make a deal normally that every post they make they get a profit or get paid a certain amount. The viewers get misread truth because in reality are those celebrities using that product that are standing in front of a pool taking a picture with? Probably not. This can get out of hand because social media is so easily accessible, and I think sometimes it can get ethically out of hand with many posts that are put out there. Here are some different examples below of influencers for different products