A couple of posts ago I wrote about a gentleman from the UK who had made some mistakes that had been captured and spread across the web. How did he get caught up in his situation?  Two men were masquerading as a woman online, basically sitting behind a fake persona.  Is this ethical? No it’s not.  Yet people do it.  On the internet you don’t have to be who you are in real life.  You don’t have to be a spotty 16 year old with a weight issue, you can be an unquestioned expert on lepidoptery.

But what about companies?  Is it fine for them to have employees not identify themselves as employees, or take it even further and pretend to be a member of a different demographic to subtly push the agenda of the company?  Again, no it’s not.  There’s even a term for it – “Sock Puppets”.  What tends to happen is that Brad in marketing slips up when posting as “Brenda, a 58 year old grandmother from Arkansas”, and the community gets suspicious and outs ‘Brenda’.

It’s true that Brad could keep up his persona, indefinitely, and be a ’secret agent’ for the company.  Yet he could still be found out, especially if he’s posting from work (most forums log the IP address of posters, and it’s a simple process to do a reverse lookup to see who owns that IP).

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The final presenter of the unconference was Kami Huyse of MyPrPro who jumped right into the engagement part of the conference.  After a brief discussion on where she was coming from on the topic of ethics, she jumped right in with an example of a flog (fake blog), asking the audience how ethical they felt that particular style of engagement was.

After a long and interesting discussion throughout the theater, the common consensus was that it wasn’t ethical.  And they just make you look stupid when you get found out, which you more likely than not will. That’s not to say that some people didn’t come down on the side of the floggers, because some did, but that was only one or two in the audience.

The real takeaway from the discussion that Kami led was that blogging is not a sales channel, and companies (especially the marketing departments) should stop viewing it as such.