Practicing ethical public relations is a key step to building your business credibility and long-term successful relations with your target audience. However, ethical concerns do not extend only to the implementation of your PR efforts, but also to the measuring and representing of your PR success. Here are the top five ethical concerns for measuring your PR efforts:
1. Fabricating positive product reviews and endorsements.
Making up positive reviews or asking someone to make them up for you and adding them to the data you are measuring is not ethical. Also, if any reviewer is getting paid to write his reviews and comments in digital space, then the company should disclose and officially record this.
- Disclosing sensitive client information.
When your clients give you their feedback, they trust you with their private information (name, email, phone and sometimes even date of birth and credit card number). Never disclose that information to a third party at any stage of your PR campaign, in both planning and measuring. Sharing your clients’ private information is unethical and will certainly undermine their trust.
- Posting content or sharing images without the client’s consent.
If your clients shared their thoughts or any other information or images with you, always make sure you can go public with that information. It’s one thing for people to offer feedback directly to your company and quite another for you to go public with it in social media.
- Providing inaccurate representation of analyzed data.
Always accurately measure, document and represent all data (website traffic statistics, social media shares, Google analytics stats, etc.). Measuring only positive data will misrepresent your PR campaign’s effectiveness and will keep you from achieving your business objectives.
- Having a biased approach to PR measurement.
As much as you want your PR campaign to work and bring the best ROI, you should be unbiased while measuring and representing your PR campaign results in order to have the most accurate representation of all facts.
Honest, accurate and unbiased representation of your findings while measuring your PR campaign results is a key way to improve your ROI and build mutually beneficial relations with your target audience.
Axia Public Relations knows how to incorporate measurement into your business strategy to help you reach and exceed your goals. Download our e-book Maximizing Your Public Relations Investment to extend the reach of your PR efforts.
Yulia Dianova is a public relations professional who is skilled in building relationships with target audiences. She provides counsel to organizations that seek PR help to further their growth and reach their goals. Yulia earned a master’s degree in public relations management from University of Maryland University College. She is fluent in Russian and English and is always looking for a new challenge. Yulia has worked for Axia Public Relations since July 2015. Learn more about Yulia Dianova. Connect with Axia on Twitter @axiapr or tell us what you think in the comments below.
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Topics: public relations, ethics, measurement
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