PRSA on Deceptive PR Practices
Los Angeles Public Relations News is officially backing the PRSA (Public Relations Society of America) who released an article Thursday in response to a recent uptrend in Public Relations Malpractice (according to the PRSA Code of Ethics and PRSA Professional Standards Advisories).
- The article states that most recent reports have included:
- Public relations firms that hire interns to write positive product reviews on online message boards
- Lobbying firms that send letters on the letterhead of other organizations
- Bloggers that write positive reviews for money as well as free products, a practice that has been deemed illegal by Federal Trade Commission rules about false advertising
- Marketing firms that use crowd-sourcing techniques to mass tweet the message of a client
- Special interests that set up and/or funding organizations whose only constituent is the organizer or funder, and that take active positions purporting to represent larger constituencies in the current national health care reform debate.
“The professional communicator” Says the PRSA, is obligated “to protect and advance the free flow of accurate and truthful information and foster informed decision making in a democratic society.”
If a client is getting attacked online by false reviews written by their competition what is a PR agency to do?
In many cases, the negative reviews are completely anonymous and impossible to remove – companies like citysearch.com, ripoffreport.com and yelp.com can become vehicles of destruction against unsuspecting business owners – many of whom have done nothing wrong. The best choice is usually to have the business owner write a rebuttal themselves, then contact their most recent clients to write positive reviews. Unfortunately, many Pr agencies respond with deceptive tactics like posting positive rebuttals under multiple fake accounts – the result is often easily spotted by consumers (the writing style is the same, they all only have 1 post on their account, they don’t have profiles filled out, they all posted within minutes of each other, etc).
Deceptive communication goes against everything PR agencies have always stood for. In the age of anonymity across the internet it may be tempting to engage in the gray areas of deceptive marketing/public relations. Be careful; these practices do more harm than good.