In today’s digital based business environment, ethics are important in establishing the reputation of the company. And for an internet marketing company working in an area that is often criticised for its lack of ethics, it is ever more important to get right when working on behalf of clients.
With immoral and illegitimate Internet marketing schemes operating and deceitful tactics being used, marketers must take extra caution when promoting their clients and their products and services on the World Wide Web and ensure they can prove themselves as an agency to be legit among an industry riddled with scams. Here are some of the main ethical issues faced by internet marketers:
Who Can Be Trusted?
Because internet marketing is full of scams and people out to gain sensitive information, it is important that you have clear guidelines and form an agreement with the client to ensure you are both comfortable and trust in each other.
You will after all be in charge of the brand’s online reputation, a big task to be reliant on for. You will then need to ensure you uphold your end of the agreement and carefully gauge any content you put out there on behalf of your client.
A Little Matter of Morals
If you are handling organic and paid internet marketing for a client, as well as maintaining and updating content on the client’s website, you need to consider the privacy and legal implications that go with it.
What you publish for the client reflects on how they are viewed by the rest of the world, and although you do the posting, if they were to be found to have anything illegal or immoral on their website, such as copyrighted images that they do not have permission to use, then it would be the client who it reflects badly on and who would suffer the consequences.
This goes back to the ethical issue of trust, as they are trusting you to uphold the law and make wise moral decisions on their behalf.
Professionalism and Reputation
Because the internet and tools within it such as social media and blogs are used for both personal and online marketing purposes, the two can very easily overlap.
An internet marketing company must consider the implications of everything they write and post online, ensuring all client information is kept separate from other clients and personal aspects of the internet to ensure the client’s reputation and your own reputation is upheld.
Once Published It Remains Forever
When you hit send on that controversial blog post or Tweet, it cannot be undone. Even if you delete the post itself, it remains in cached page archives forever and can easily be pulled up by search engines or websites that specialise in recalling old pages.
Additionally, video and movies, audio and images, any kind of multimedia in various formats will remain and be viewable, which brings about the issue of consent, privacy and safety.
