As I was watching the YouTube video of Paull Young talking about social networking on Fox Business tonight, I was reminded of a very uncomfortable situation I encountered a few months ago.
This past October, I gave a presentation on marketing with a small budget during a breakout session at the Alabama Community Healthy Marriage Initiative’s State Conference. My audience consisted of state employees with a mean age of about 40 years old who needed to learn cheap ways to market their educational services and state programs. After spending several months in Robert French’s class, I was obviously very quick to tell them about all that social media has to offer. The conversation and questions eventually led to Facebook and MySpace as tools to use when marketing to people under the age of 25. Before I knew it, my boss and I were put on the defense because someone who had worked for the state school superintendent told us that it was unethical and hypocritical to market to young people on those sites because they tell them at school not to get on the sites in order to avoid online predators.
In this situation, we were talking about relationship educators, youth group directors, etc. and how they can get on the social networking sites for free to connect with their students. A colleague of mine made the point that if there are online predators on the sites then we need more educators on the sites to combat the bad people. The kids are going to be on there regardless of whether or not the school tells them not to do so.
So this poses a very important question for public relations professionals: what is the code of ethics for social networking sites? Especially when your public is under 18? Any input?