CHAPTER 3

Honesty

Honesty is the best policy, yet all of us lie at some point or another in our lives. If you spend any time reading Kant, you realize that telling 100 percent of the truth 100 percent of the time is challenging. Do you tell the truth if someone wants to hurt someone you love and asks you where they are? Do you tell the truth when your significant other asks how they look in an outfit? Yet, that creates a dangerous slippery slope when people think it is okay to lie sometimes.

PRSA’s Code of Ethics states:

What Is Truth?

There are entire philosophy books written on this topic. It requires some examination of conscience. Before we delve into honesty best practices in communication, it is important to ask what is truth?

Most people say truth is that which is in accordance with facts or reality. But sometimes, there are honest disputes where both people are telling the truth as they know it. When I’m talking to young professionals, I bring up the example of the gold and white or blue and black dress. You get passionate arguments on both sides, and both people are saying the truth based on their perception.

Jeff Hahn, the author of Breaking Bad News,¹ believes truth is a negotiated reality. He says:

I’ve come to appreciate over all these years of doing crisis work the extent to which two sides of a story can both be true. It depends on perspective. The perspective of the stakeholders from all sides must be accounted for in order for there to be an authentic and ethical message that appears in the dialogue between the stakeholders.

One of the more intriguing and psychologically challenging aspects of the craft is that as time moves forward, the truth in a particular moment may not stay the truth as things evolve. Truth is a negotiated reality, and one that is not stuck in time. It continues to be negotiated and replayed and reconstituted. We do that to ourselves. We reframe history all the time.

Robert Johnson, the former Head of TSA Communications and Host of PR Nation podcast, considers honesty to be one of the biggest ethical challenges facing PR pros today:

The line is blurred today. People stretch, bend, blindfold the truth, they submit statements as the truth, when it’s just opinion. Opinion has taken over.

I’m old enough to remember the days when the opinions in the media were limited to certain parts of the broadcast or two pages of the newspaper. Now, it’s across the spectrum. Our biggest ethical challenge is making sure that we are attuned to the truth, that we know how to wash all the opinion out of it, and that we don’t necessarily accept that any media outlet is free from that problem.

I see this in every media outlet. The celebrity journalist has taken over, everybody needs to get clicks and likes and views and shares on their social media channels. They have a tote board in the Washington Post newsroom where reporters can see how their stories are playing during the day with audiences. How does that benefit journalism?

It shouldn’t be good enough for people to just assign a truth-telling label to someone who screams the loudest. But today if you talk enough about something and you say it like you mean it, the media, more often than not, is going to take that. If they agree with you, they will adopt it as the truth, if they don’t, then they beat you over the head with it. You have to make sure that everything you say can be backed up and referenced.

José Manuel Velasco, past President of the Global Alliance for Public Relations and Communication Management, provides advice on PR’s most important job—taking care of the truth:

The narrative must be very solid and be grounded in facts in context. It’s important to put together the main message, and the context to give people the opportunity to understand the whole picture. The context is a very important part of the truth because it helps to understand why, under what circumstances, and for what things happen.

Sometimes, we are dealing with the perceptions more than facts. Stakeholders should have the opportunity to ask the organization why they made a decision. That’s why, it’s essential that the organization creates a system of emphatic listening. It’s not about telling the stakeholders what they want to hear, but what is useful and true so that they can make their decision in relationship with the company.

You must organize conversations with all stakeholders. You must create safe spaces to host that dialogue, because sometimes we create channels to speak with the stakeholders only from our perspective. It’s very important to show the stakeholders that you are taking consideration of their issues.

We must also be aware that as PR managers, we are serving our organization, but at the same time, we are serving the social trust. We have a social responsibility that goes beyond our companies.

Sometimes that could put us in an uncomfortable situation because they are paying our salaries, but at the same time, we are serving the public interest.

Truth is made up of facts and also emotions. Emotions are very important in our lives. To feel fear because you are fighting with a different or dangerous situation is a fact and an emotion. We must not separate facts from emotions.

Brands want to highlight their ethical actions, but that can lead to ethics-washing.

David Herrick, Managing Principal of EthicOne, counsels against it:

A company we’ve worked closely with found through market research that if they talk about ethics and values with no proof points, they harm themselves with their customers who actually trust them less.

When they backed it up with true data points and true facts about how they operated, how they behave, how they received honors and designations when it came to their ethical business conduct, then it became a powerful incentive for customers and employees.

The first step is not to go talk about how ethical you are. The first step is to get your policies, procedures, practices in place so you can actually deliver on ethics and trust.

Honesty Ethics Issues in Action

Dave Close, retired Managing Director of MSL Boston, put it into perspective when he discusses how little fails with honesty can lead to unethical requests:

We’re set up from movies and TV that the bad guy is really bad, and he’s going to be a scowling guy with evil intent who is going to instruct people to lie and do terrible things. That does not reflect reality. What happens is almost every day in business there are a lot of little ethical decisions that you must make. Almost all of them, at least at the start, are not that big of deal. It’s a little thing, it’s trim here and there. But if you go along with it, you can set yourself down a path where the situation becomes more dire.

I worked with a lot of startup companies that had very hard-charging people, and they would move very quickly, and sometimes, it would be kind of sloppy. Many of these companies did IPOs and were then subject to SEC oversight.

One client wanted us to write and issue a press release declaring a big sale. I hadn’t heard of this big sale. I started poking around and asking questions. It turned out that it was just a letter of intent.

As a small privately held startup, touting letters of intent might be okay. It shows momentum. But as a public company, a letter of intent is not a sale. Eventually the shareholders or even the SEC are going to want to know where’s the revenue. I started asking the client, and they ultimately agreed that there was some potential downside to calling a letter of intent a sale. If we hadn’t pressed with tough questions to find the truth, they may well have been in trouble.

We saw in the 2016 election the ability of almost comically untrue stories and information to go viral to the point where you can start doubting there is an objective truth to a situation. That’s a real concern, we seem to be drifting more and more into an environment Rudy Giuliani described with that stunning line. “The truth isn’t truth.” A real epitaph for our times.

One of the most frequent failures of truth are false and misleading claims. From greenwashing and wokewashing to inflating numbers, this is one of the most common ethical challenges.

Joe Cohen, APR, CCO of AXIS Capital, faced a challenge when the FDA questioned the truthfulness of KIND bars claiming to being Healthy when he worked there.

KIND was asked to remove the word Healthy from the label on several of its snack bars because of what we felt was an outdated guideline that just looked at the fat content in the product. The KIND bars in question were made of nuts that were high in good fats. It wasn’t as well-known back in 1990 when the regulations were written that there were good fats and bad fats. Because of that, we were told that we had to take Healthy off the product.

We felt that was wrong. It was outdated guidance, and we decided to push back. We took pains to be very respectful and to push back in a way that was smart and strategic, but never contentious.

A small team worked on it. Our general counsel, the marketing team, and then comms and I had to report in to the CMO. We worked 24/7 when the news broke. In high-pressure situations like that, you’re exhausted because you’re working round the clock, making decisions in real time, and you’re doing it with very little sleep.

We developed a collaborative productive relationship with the FDA, and ultimately, they changed course and reversed that guideline. It wound up being not just a victory for KIND, but it also was a good example of how industry and government can work together to resolve differences in a productive manner.

Despite pros best efforts, eventually they will likely at some point unwittingly share false or incorrect information. Janelle Guthrie, APR, Fellow PRSA, of the Building Industry Association of Washington, discusses what to do in that situation:

My biggest ethical challenge came when I was working on a heated political campaign. I received a call from a reporter saying he’d heard my candidate had inflated his resume. The candidate’s biography listed him as a commercial real estate broker. The tipster said that he hadn’t achieved the credentials to be a broker. Not knowing the ins and outs of commercial real estate, I waited for him to come in and I asked him. He replied “I’m an agent. I’ve never been a broker.” When we told him we’ve been calling him a broker he said, “Well, we should fix that.”

I recommended issuing a media advisory saying we’re fixing it in. We discussed whether we needed to do that. It’s a good idea because people will understand there was a mistake, and we fixed it.

What I learned from that was to have the confidence to ask and don’t assume. As an ethical advisor, a big part of our role is to question and clarify things. What sounded like a little thing, the difference between a real estate broker and a real estate agent, was actually a big deal to people who were brokers and had gone through the work to achieve that designation. Also, if you have a reputation of telling the truth and admitting when there are mistakes, then you receive more grace from the general public.

Moving from what you say to what you do—another common intentional failure of truth deals with expense reports. When you travel for a company, you invariably spend some of your own money because you forget to get a receipt. Some people turn to lying on their expense reports to make up for the loss. This is a global issue. Hasan Zuberi, President of the PR Council of Pakistan, explains:

I remember what I used to do, like all my colleagues … if you’re going to a client’s office, we took the bus and we used to charge for the cabs. Our taxi fare cost 200 rupees, but a public bus only cost 20 rupees. I used to pocket those 180 rupees.

But I realized it was not right. It wasn’t limited to Pakistan. When I moved to the UAE, we had a procedure for submitting taxi company invoices. I submitted my taxi expenses as they really were and my HR exec called me and he said, “Your boss was not happy with you because he was charging a good double the amount for the same destination.”

But the executive told me to keep honesty as a trait. This has been a good practice that I started following, and still do today.

Lying on time sheets is another common casualty of the truth in agencies. Darryl Salerno, Owner of Second Quadrant Solutions, shares his experience:

I know of many instances at other agencies where the time sheet was manipulated. Time must be logged exactly the way it was spent. There is a tendency to not want to go over budget and to move time from a budget that may be going over to a budget that has room on it. Even within the same client, that’s not right. If one budget goes over and one budget is under, that’s the way it is.

Every hour must be logged exactly the way it was spent. When I was running my own agency, I would say, “And if anybody ever tells you differently, let me know because I will fire them on the spot.” To me, the sanctity of the accuracy of the information that goes into the system is critically important in terms of fairness to the client and employees getting credit for the time that they work.

These issues haven’t changed since the 1970s. For some employees, it’s hard to push back unless you know that top management within the company has a point of view on this. Problems come up when a manager feels that their career may be somewhat at risk if they blow a budget. It’s important for top management to make it clear to the employees at all levels that that’s not acceptable behavior.

There’s also another aspect of this, and that’s agencies have to be very careful about how they articulate problems with over-servicing. If you are giving someone a hard time about blowing a budget, some time won’t get logged because people are afraid that they’re going to look bad.

You have to accept that there are many causes to be over or under budget, because it’s not a science, it’s an art. Have the mindset of “I need to know, I need to understand, I need to get a handle on why we went over budget to not repeat those mistakes going forward.”

If I’m at the top of the management chain, I want my managers to understand we’ll work together and figure out how to solve the problem. You can’t just say to an employee, “Listen, I gave you 30 hours to work on this this month” because if you tell them you gave them 30 hours, they’re going to only log 30 hours.

But if you say to them, “I gave you 30 hours to work on this this month, but I may be wrong, you may need more than that. If you do, just let me know.” That’s a matter of language, but it’s a whole different way that the employee has now been given permission to do what they need to do for the client, which is what’s most critical.

Another common failure of truth is when PR professionals guarantee media coverage or overpromise. Mike Neumeier, APR, CEO of Arketi Group, explains:

I have worked under a few folks that made over-reaching promises as far as what an agency can do for a client. Those are always tricky situations, especially when you’re early in your career and you’ve got a business owner that’s all but guaranteeing something will happen. All you can do is work your butt off to try to make it happen.

In the PR world, we can’t guarantee placements. We can’t guarantee that an elite media outlet is going to take interest in a story, or that they’re even going to sit down and have a cup of coffee with someone.

Beyond guaranteeing media coverage, some clients ask you to promote vaporware. Cheryl Goodman, former Head of Corporate Communication for Sony Electronics North America, explains how to avoid this:

Avoiding vaporware starts a year and a half before launch when there’s an articulation of when it will come out. As you get closer to those launch timeframes and you start to see key features fall to the wayside, it’s like, “Okay, we’re aiming to meet a date. What’s more important, meeting the date or meeting customers’ expectations?”

This is a very legitimate conflict because first to market is a premium in perception and potentially revenue. The solution is finding a balance and calibrating expectations early and often. Working under embargo with a journalist, letting them know what your intent is, and maybe put less focus on whether it launches in the fourth quarter on the 31st at 11:59 p.m. to meet that deadline. It is calibrating expectations and being that voice of reason in the room.

It’s not always a popular voice. The corporate communications person is always looking out for the greater good of the brand. Speaking generally, there’s often conflict between product PR people and corporate communications. The product PR people are measured on success of the product, and corporate PR pros are measured on success of the brand.

You’ve got to be ready to negotiate and be the voice of reason.

It goes beyond vaporware. PR pros can often be asked to make absurd and misleading claims. Ron Culp, APR, Fellow PRSA, Director of Public Relations and Advertising Master’s Program at DePaul University, shares a delicious example:

I was working at Sara Lee Corporation. Charlie Lubin, who founded the bakery, was a believer that everything had to be all natural, but there was a big push to create desserts that had fewer calories. Every time Sara Lee tried to come up with something that stayed true to all-natural ingredients but had fewer calories, it didn’t taste good.

We just kept working on it. Finally, they came up with this dessert that they labeled Lite, and we were asked to promote it through a public relations and marketing campaign.

One day a reporter from the New York Times called our media person and asked her if she could give them some information about the product and its ingredients. We provided it and then he says, “Yes, but we had it tested and found that it had the same calorie content, even though it was labeled L-I-T-E.”

We went into a kind of a mini-crisis mode to find out what went on and found out from the division that it was indeed lite if you cut it in eight slices rather than six slices.

It was a true OMG moment for those of us in the PR department. The head of media relations was told that we should respond by saying “It’s lite, as in texture.”

My colleague simply said, “I just can’t say that. That’s just ridiculous. I’m going to look like a fool.” My management team said, “Well, that’s what our statement’s going to be. So, you, Culp need to give that response.”

I did, and it had to be one of the most embarrassing quotes I’ve ever seen in my life. I got a lot of grief from other PR friends and media friends who said, “You’ve got to be kidding,” which is exactly what the New York Times reporter said. But I was quoted as saying “It’s lite as in texture.” We didn’t have much wiggle room to get out of it. If I could do it over again, I would never have been caught in that predicament.

Never compromise your personal ethical standards. I knew my mother would look at me and say, “You’re kidding,” if I tried that line with her. I felt awful after I hung up from the phone having said that. I should have pushed back and insisted on a different kind of response. The ensuing story made me look like a fool.

A few years later I joined the Arthur Page Society and fully embraced the seven Page Principles, especially the very first one, to tell the truth. From that day forward, it was so much easier.

The competition all had Lite products. The big difference is they tasted awful. Eventually we essentially threw up our hands and said, “People are buying our products because they taste good, and they’re going to use them for special occasions.”

If I had to do it again, I would have thrown myself into the data and the package literature, to understand exactly what this product contained. Instead, we just took everyone’s word for the fact that it was lite, L-I-T-E. As a result, we got caught in this situation. If it sounds too good to be true or tastes too good to be true … it is.

Sometimes the client specifically asks you to lie for them. Gini Dietrich, the founder of SpinSucks, shares an example:

A few years ago, a client called me and said, “I know you have former journalists on staff. Could you have one of them call Governor’s office and pretend that they’re from the city newspaper, and see if you can get some information?”

And I was like, “No???”

He gave me a hard time about it. I had to sit down with him and explain why that wasn’t ethical. He finally kind of got it. I don’t think he totally agreed with me; I think to this day he doesn’t think that there was anything wrong it. But he finally came around to if I want this done, it’s not going to be through my PR firm.

Sometimes the lies are more insidious. Marcy Massura, CEO of MM & Company, faced a more difficult situation:

I had a prospect wanting to promote subscription sales on a SaaS solution, but they were planning on shuttering it. They were just trying to generate ending cashflow. The ethical question was where does my loyalty lay?

Anybody who knows me knows that I’m kind of a loudmouth. I’m not known as being subtle in any capacity. I immediately raised the red flag saying that this would put both my name and my company name in a bad light. Their claim was, you can just say that you didn’t know. You can play stupid.

I said to them, “I don’t ever want to be in a position where I have to defend my actions in that manner.” The truth is, you don’t get a chance to defend yourself. Once people think of you one way, that’s the perception. There’s no court of ethics. They mentioned that things can go away at any moment. Any client could be closing down and you may not know about it. So, it shouldn’t matter.

The difference for me is I did know about it.

I respectfully declined the contract. However, I did recommend another individual who would do the work. You could say that that was a bit of an ethical compromise because I certainly wasn’t on my moral high ground. It was kind of a middle ground.

Some clients may ask you to tell the truth, but to do it in a way that promotes fear. Melanie Ensign, the former Head of Security, Privacy, and Engineering Communications for Uber, advises against this:

There is a huge tendency in security and privacy to rely on FUD tactics (fear, uncertainty, and doubt). A lot of this comes from security companies trying to sell solutions.

To be fair, I’ve been in their shoes. I have done that. I understand the angst and why that feels like an obvious path. But we can do a better job educating our internal and external clients on why that is such a dangerous path if our goal is to protect people.

If you understand how the brain responds to that type of stimuli, then you understand that it’s counterproductive. That is why, we see the same issues popping up over and over again in the data protection space. We are simultaneously trying to scare people while shoving new information at them. Psychologically, that’s not how the cognitive mind works.

We have created this dangerous situation within the security space where the topic in general demobilizes a lot of people. They tune out. We have warning fatigue, because there are too many things coming at us at once. When people are scared of something, they’re less likely to pay attention to it. It’s hard for them to make good decisions. It’s important to understand how the human brain actually responds to stimuli like that.

When I see someone going down this path of fear mongering, I know right away their number one priority is not actually protecting people. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows, but you need to talk about risk in a way that’s going to help people grasp the concept and to take action rather than make them run away or stick their head in the sand.

Rather than use FUD, we should liken it to the process of learning how to scuba dive. I am an avid scuba diver and a shark advocate. It is not natural for humans to breathe underwater. Every part of your body is avidly against this process. When you’re starting out, there can be a lot of anxiety. Yet if we didn’t teach and train people how to manage that risk and how to protect themselves, imagine all of the things that we would never know about the ocean?

It’s just a matter of understanding, “Why are people are worried about this?” And recognizing that information and curiosity is the antidote to that.

If somebody is scared of something, it’s usually because they don’t understand it or because they’re lacking information. I teach my teams to look at this as if we’re teaching somebody to scuba dive. There are risks. We need to be honest about those risks, otherwise you might make a dangerous mistake. But if we fixate on that, we’re never going to get them to the next step, which is helping them have a productive and enjoyable experience.

There’s a security conference we host in Hawaii and every year. I started developing a dive track to help security engineers and security professionals get certified in scuba diving. I take them through that process with a dive master so that they now have a very recent experience of going through that fear. They now personally understand what it is like to overcome that anxiety and the experience they had once they got to the other side. I tell them to pay close attention to things that the dive master is doing to help guide them through that learning experience.

In the world of cybersecurity, we have to be the dive masters. We are responsible for protecting people and teaching them what they can do to protect themselves.

Sometimes, it is people who work for you who demonstrate dishonesty and unethical behavior. Ana Toro, APR, Fellow PRSA, who works in communication for the CDC, shares an example from her work in another organization.

I was brought to lead a program and oversee the work of three subcontractors. I discovered two subcontractors were demonstrating unethical conduct and inappropriate behaviors.

They were not serving the best interests of the client. In my eyes, they were not following high standards of accuracy and truth. The subcontractor was not being truthful to the client on calls. So, after careful consideration, less than a week after I began the role, I had to fire one of the subcontractors.

My company and the contractor’s officers were very scared about my decision, but I took a stand and walked them through it, with clear examples that supported my arguments. I even called former employees to gather additional history on the situation.

I was very honest with the team and told them what happened and why the decision was made. Tell them the why because you don’t want this to continue.

It’s not a decision that is often done in the company, because there’s always concern, “There’s going to be a lawsuit. Now they’re going to come after us. They’re not going to want to work with us anymore,” but I was firm and convinced it had to happen.

My supervisor backed me, and we were able to do it. The decision proved to be the right decision when my client thanked me a few weeks later.

Intellectual Property

Intellectual property theft represents another common area of ethical failure for professionals with honesty at its core. Elise Mitchell, APR, Fellow PRSA, former Chairman of Mitchell Communications Group, explains:

A very common ethics challenge is the temptation to use other people’s ideas. Lapses are far too common. You see it every day. It’s so maddening. We’ve got to do a better job as an industry of respecting the ideas, words, and designs, everything that is inherent in somebody else’s intellectual property.

The first time this came to light for me was when I was on the Cannes Lion PR Jury several years ago. The judges kept commenting to each other about, “Oh my goodness, I’ve seen this idea a hundred times.” It finally came to a head about Day 2 because there was repetition of ideas from the past where somebody had taken a campaign and had just recreated it but tried to make it appear as though it was their own. It created a very intense discussion amongst us, as jurors, about what are the ethical standards we would expect people to live up to, globally.

As a group we said, “We’re not going to accept it.” I was proud of how our group took a very firm stand on this because there was some incredibly creative work that when we began to research it and think it through, we said, “Yes, but we’ve seen this idea done many times.” But other people would say, “But there’s not an original idea in the world.”

What we decided, was, “You can’t take an idea from your own industry and use it in sort of a blanket way to where it becomes clear that it was taken from somebody else.” We wanted to challenge people to be original in their thinking. Now, you could take an idea from another industry, and put a different twist on it. This is a subtlety, but it’s crucial, because this is a core part of the Code of Ethics for PRSA, you cannot take other people’s ideas.

This begs the bigger questions of “What’s original?” and “What are we allowed to use in terms of looking around at other very successful and cool ideas and using them in different ways?”

There is no original idea under the sun in terms of basic storylines. Those of us who are storytellers know that. There’s nothing wrong with building off of a basic blueprint for putting a campaign together. Where you cross the line is when you begin using the nuances of other people’s campaigns and ideas so blatantly that you begin to see it’s a shadow of another campaign.

The key question you have to ask yourself is, “How do you put a truly unique twist on it, put your brand or client’s fingerprints on it in a way that is authentic to them, but doesn’t feel like a complete knockoff of something else?”

There isn’t a shortage of ideas. The hardest part of an ideation session is turning the corner to say, “Okay, what are our two or three best out of the 320 ideas we’ve just come up with?”

That’s where you have to stop and say, “Are we consciously or subconsciously using somebody else’s idea? We should stop and check.” That’s where you challenge your creative process to go to the next level, based on a strategic insight that makes the idea authentically yours.

Bonnie Upright, APR, Vice President of Employee and Client Communications for Citi, shares an example of IP theft that struck very close to home.

My mother passed away in 2015 from pancreatic cancer, 29 days from diagnosis to death. She knew the day she was diagnosed; she was terminal. She went home, she sat down, she wrote her obituary. It was brilliant. I of course did my daughterly duties. I submit the obituary to the local newspaper here in Jacksonville.

She wrote every single word. It was wonderful. Because of the relationship I have as a PR person here in Jacksonville, a few of my media friends picked up on it, and Times Union did a story about the obituary and how great it was. Next thing you know … another friend whose husband happened to work at the TODAY Show saw it on my Facebook and saw the Times Union story. So suddenly it shows up on the TODAY Show. Well, once it shows up on the TODAY Show, Good Morning America’s not far behind, and CBS, and all of them.

I hate the phrase went viral, but that’s what happened. It went everywhere. I thought, well, this is kind of cool. My mom has kind of given me something to do, throughout the grief process. So, I immediately did what any good PR person does as the interview requests are coming in … I set up a Dropbox with high-res images and captions, and I’ve got the obituary as a PDF, and in Word, so I can refer all of these editors and reporters.

A few months later, I’m sitting in the movie theater and a friend of mine texts me a story from a Richmond paper. It is a story saying how wonderful a particular woman’s obituary was. Isn’t this fantastic and great? I look at it, it’s some older woman. She was 101, I think. Her picture next to my mother’s words. Straight up, all of my mother’s words.

I called my brother, and we realized that somebody had plagiarized the obituary, basically just changed out the names and dates. Very, very personal details. But everything else was there, the lede, the middle, the closing graph. All of it. It was crazy.

The night it happened I posted on the newspaper’s Facebook page going, “Hey, this is kind of cool. But it was cool the first time when my mother wrote it back in Jacksonville,” and shared a link. The next morning, I get up, I hadn’t slept much that night. I call the newsroom at 8:15 in the morning and spoke with the assistant news editor. He said, we were just talking about you and were going to reach out to you. Will you do an interview with us? I said sure. I take the high road, of course … my mother would want me to. “Isn’t it flattering that someone loves your words so much, mom, that they took them for themselves?” Great, fine. My position was this woman was over a 100 years old. It wasn’t as if they didn’t know she was not going to be alive for much longer. They had time to write something. Right? You’ve had time to write something.

Honestly, the bleeding heart in me also was very much, “This mom deserved her own story.” Everyone has their own story.

Within another month or so, it happens again. Then it happens again. Montana, similar situation. I get a hold of the family, they cry, they apologize. They play the Montana card, “We just live in Montana. Nothing like this ever happens in Montana. We didn’t know it was going to be viral. We didn’t know the newspaper would pick up on it.” I’m like of course they’re going to pick up on it. What are you doing? So, they apologize and we move on.

Since then, it has been plagiarized 14 or 15 times now, either in whole or in part. There’s a paragraph in the middle where my mother talks about her grandchildren. She said, “My greatest treasures call me Nana,” and she talks about them. The last paragraph, the part about, “You can look for me in the daffodils, you can look for me in the butterflies.” There are certain things that clearly resonate with folks. So, I try to track them down as best I can.

I know my mother would probably say, “Bonnie, just get over it. Don’t worry about it.” But for me and my brother, that was my mother’s last love letter to her family. It’s very personal. She sat up in bed at hospice and read it to us a few days that week before she died.

Please don’t use my mother’s words. Those were words that were meant for us, and special for us. But again, this whole thing of, “Well, it was on the Internet, so I must be able to take it.” It’s like when people lift photos from online, with no attribution or anything. All I ask for is simple attribution, and sometimes I get it, and sometimes I don’t.

If I don’t, I just let it go. Who has time to chase them all down? But I do have Google alerts set up on all these various phrases. That’s how I find them, or someone will say, “Oh my gosh, here’s another one.”

The stories are crazy though. There was an Illinois one, it turned out to be a meth head. The family started arguing because they said, “Aunt X never would have never written this, she was a meth head. This doesn’t sound like her.” Then a columnist got a hold of the story. I mean, this is crazy town, but what are you going to do?

If for some reason you can’t get a hold of someone for permission, at the very least give attribution. It doesn’t take away from your blog post, or from your image. Now if you start using it to make money, that is a whole different thing, attribution ain’t going to cover your ass there, that’s for sure.

But Holy Moly. Don’t steal, people. Don’t steal.

Other Examples

Judy DeRango Wicks, APR, Fellow PRSA and former communications lead for Fiserv, shares an example of how she ethically addressed a situation when she could benefit from misinformation around their online billing technology:

After 9/11, someone was mailing anthrax in envelopes through the postal system. It seemed like 200 reporters had the same idea at the same time. They called me to say, “Isn’t this going to be great for online bill pay? Are you seeing a surge of adoption?”

There was temptation to say “Yes, we’re seeing a surge in adoption,” but it wasn’t true. We understood behavior well enough to know that we probably would not, because fear was not what led people to pay their bills online.

We relied on data to make sure we were being accurate. We were doing lots of research, so we were excruciatingly knowledgeable about bill pay behavior and different types of people, and their attitudes toward paying bills.

This was before social media, but it was a wildfire story. Everybody was covering the anthrax story. I could’ve jumped into that by saying what these reporters kept asking me 50 different ways trying to get me to say, “We’re getting a surge.”

As a public company, that would be unethical and a bad idea. When earnings came around, investors would ask about the surge. We had to step back and think how are we going to respond to these inquiries? With the help of our agency, we decided that we would participate in positive stories that talked about all the good things about bill pay that would truly drive adoption—that you save time, that you’re protected by a guarantee, you have a record of payments, and so on.

We had the agency filter these inquiries. If it sounded like they wanted to do a story about fear of anthrax, we would decline participation. But if a reporter said yes, they would do a thorough story about bill pay and how to get started, and all those things that could lead us to having people try it, then we would do those interviews. We sacrificed many articles.

It was the right thing to do. We ended up with some perfect stories. The USA Today story was so perfect that I framed it and put it on the wall. It said exactly what we had intended.

Also, we did not see the wisdom in associating our brand with anthrax, of all things. Why would I want a sentence that had my company name connected with anthrax? So, we avoided being associated with anthrax when we were barely getting started becoming a known brand.

A few weeks later. I was at the PRSA International Convention, and I’m sitting next to the head of PR for Hallmark Cards, and we had an interesting conversation—the same reporters were calling her trying to get her to say, “Are people afraid of sending Christmas cards this year?” It was interesting to see firsthand that they were trying to put the quote in our mouth, and we had to resist to keep that from happening.

Honesty and Ethics Advice

It is not all negative. Paul Omodt, APR, Fellow PRSA, the principal of Omodt and Associates, discusses how honesty repairs reputations:

I’ve worked with individuals and brands who’ve done unethical things. I tell them after the apology, you have to work from the inside out. I’ll actually throw a rock in a puddle of water and have them watch the ripples go out. We’ll identify those closest people that they need to go reach out to.

There’s a theory of communications that says the people that are hurt the most, deserve the closest, most personal communication.

I have those people reach out personally to those people and have a conversation. That’s a very difficult conversation to have. It will stress them out. But once they do it, they feel slightly less burdened by their emotions and then they move onto the next one and the next one and the next one.

I had a client who had used the N word when he was younger. It was captured on a video tape that surfaced 20 years later. It cost him his high-profile job.

He said, that is something I said in that moment when I was 19 years old. Now I’m a 40-year-old man. I need to own that. He went out to all the people who have been impacted by that and then all the churches in the area. He slowly worked his way back up and literally five years later, he got appointed back to that post because people saw real contrition.

But it was a step-by-step process of apologizing both personally or in letters or in group settings, it was a very metered out. The clients that I work with on situations like that feel better about it over time, and they feel like a more complete person.

Mark Dvorak, APR, Fellow PRSA, Executive Director of Golin Atlanta, also sees how consistent honesty helps when you make a mistake:

I was blessed to have the chance to be around Al Golin and listen to him for years before he passed away. Al was the brains and thought leader behind the Trust Bank. About how everything comes down to trust and doing the right things on an everyday basis and building relationships so that when you have a challenge, folks are more likely to support you … or at least give you the benefit of the doubt.

Today, the biggest threat to ethical behavior for PR practitioners is fake news. I’m sitting here watching the hearing on the whistleblower complaint with the White House and thinking, “Wow.” We have as a society screwed up the idea of what’s a fact and what’s not a fact. It’s an issue for public relations as it creates more of this gray area in our jobs. It’s a slippery slope. We’ve got to do something about it.

Fortunately, I was a double major in communications and history. When you study history, you realize that a lot of things are cyclical in the world. What allows me to sleep at night is the fact that I believe we as a profession and society are going to react powerfully enough that the pendulum is going to swing back to the other side. There’s a reason you have multiple sources. There’s a reason you’d have three editors reviewing and fact checking.

Col. Ann Knabe, PhD, APR+M, U.S. Air Force, discusses the threat of disinformation and dishonest information being spread about companies:

What bristles me is how writers are associating disinformation with public relations. One article from a national outlet² had a headline that said, “Disinformation for hire. How a new breed of PR firms is selling lies online” and called the rise of disinformation, black PR. That’s not how I perceive our profession.

I’m trying to be really clear when I’m saying dis, with a D. Disinformation is different from misinformation, with an M. Dis-information is false information, intended to mislead. Disinformation is very deliberate, very purposeful. It is deception to distribute untrue material that’s intended to influence public opinion.

Disinformation has become easier to spread with social media. But disinformation is rooted in the Russian term dezinformatsiya. Looking back at the 1920s, the Soviet Union was using fake or false information as a weapon. Later, we saw it pop-up during the Cold War. But in the last couple of years, where I’ve observed this is the spread of fake news is on social media, with that very deliberate intent of being deceptive. With the rise of automated and artificial intelligence, fake social media accounts, and fake news sites, disinformation can now get more traffic generated more quickly than a human could.

The sad part about it is a lot of these sophisticated technologies are being used to target real people. They’re using the sophisticated algorithms of Facebook and other social media that initially were very good things, but now can be used in a very nefarious way. These algorithms are affecting what shows up on your feeds and can be used to manipulate vulnerable people.

It’s very difficult to stay ahead of this. It’s almost impossible. But I insist the firms doing this are not public relations firms. It’s contrary to what our profession stands for, and it’s contrary to the PRSA Code of Ethics.

Quentin Langley, Author of Brandjack, highlights issues with honesty and brandjacking:

It is so easy to create blatantly false statements about organizations. I wrote in my last book, Brandjack,³ about a Twitter trend, “Seriously McDonald’s?” that was a Photoshop sign in a McDonald’s window saying that they were going to charge more to African American customers. It was untrue, but it went all over Twitter. I think that reflects what a lot of people think about McDonald’s. There are lot of brands, like Whole Foods, where no one would’ve taken it seriously.

Responding to untrue allegations can be challenging. It depends on the reservoir of goodwill that brands already have. For McDonald’s, there is a lot of hostility to the brand. There are a lot of people who like the brand as well, but it seems to me that a lot of McDonald’s customers view it in a very transactional way. It’s not a brand that they feel loyal to. So, for McDonald’s, handling that is very difficult.

Then there’s the issue if someone within your organization shares a tweet of fake news or any number of stupid conspiracy theories. How does the organization deal with that? If the CEO finds out that someone who works for the organization has shared a tweet saying, “Coronavirus as a hoax.” How do you deal with that? Do you fire the person for sharing that tweet? Well then, we go back to this freedom of speech issue and say, “Well, that’s his view, he’s not speaking on behalf of the organization.”

It has to be a case-by-case judgment. How senior is the person, how associated is the person with the brand? If you’re using the brand’s Twitter feed, then that crosses a line immediately, and it doesn’t matter who you are. If it is a very senior person with within an organization who is strongly associated with the brand, it potentially crosses a line.

Author Peter Shankman reminds us we do not need to be perfect:

Even though in today’s political climate, lying has been almost approved—we need to understand that’s not actually the case. You will get caught.

That’s what amazes me about this world that we’re in right now. Everyone thinks it’s okay to lie, and they don’t think they’re going to get caught. It’s so easy to get caught. The key is we have a much shorter attention span, so we don’t care that much anymore, but there are people who do.

Because the bar is so ridiculously low, when it comes to what we expect from companies, we don’t need to be awesome. We just need to suck a little less than normal.

If we expect everyone to suck, then I don’t need a brand to be great. I just need them to understand that they could be a little bit better. If it comes down to an ethical dilemma that you’re facing, doing the right thing is going to pay off.

 

¹ J. Hahn. 2020. Breaking Bad News: 12 Essential Crisis Communication Tools, Sky Harbor Farm Publishing.

² C. Silverman. January 06, 2020. Buzzfeed. www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/disinformation-for-hire-black-pr-firms.

³ Q. Langley. 2014. Brandjack, Springer.