Many of us laughed, or felt horribly betrayed (or eventually both) when we discovered the truth about such social media mistakes as the Wal-Mart fake blogs or Sony’s failed attempt at a "viral" campaign on YouTube. We would have winced if we had made those kinds of mistakes on behalf of one of our own sites. Wouldn’t it be great if there were some rules for social media?
As it turns out, social media have now been around long enough that professional organizations are taking notice. I don’t mean just companies like Wal-Mart and Sony whose PR firms fumbled the ball. I mean public relations organizations. It looks like they’re finally getting enough of a clue to realize that their members need some guidance.
I was glad to see that the Chartered Institute for Public Relations has put out a document detailing best practices in social media. The CIPR says it is the largest public relations institute in Europe, with 9,000 members for all sectors of the industry. With any luck, these guidelines will be widely disseminated, and we’ll see fewer gaffes like the ones I noted earlier.
As a site owner and/or an SEO professional, your focus may be on getting to the top of the SERPs, but you can’t ignore the public relations aspect of your job. The two are almost inseparable, when you stop to think about it. You may already be using social media to help promote your site. Or maybe you have clients that are thinking about dipping their toes into the web 2.0 free-for-all. Even if you aren’t a PR professional, you will probably find these guidelines helpful as well. At the very least, they’ll tell you what to avoid – and if you get a particularly pushy client, you can point to them and explain to your client why his or her approach won’t work.
Colin Farrington, director general of the CIPR, said that the guidelines were created to help the organization’s members “more fully understand these new communication tools and the implications they have for our industry and business generally. We already know about planned EU legislation which will oblige businesses not to mislead consumers in any way in their use of social media.” Even in countries not bound by the laws of the EU, these guidelines can help PR (and perhaps SEO) professionals “to better serve their organizations by ensuring they are operating ethically and legally…”
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