December 10th, 2009

Ethical Issues in Marketing Research and Social Media

The aim of the social media marketer to learn more about the behaviour of the customer in order to better satisfy their needs is sometimes tricky when it comes to ethical issues. The European Society for Opinion and Marketing Research (ESOMAR) has in a recent survey distinguished four ethical concerns that persists in the the online marketing business, despite the often good intentioned nature of the research. These are: intrusions on privacy, the misuse of marketing research findings, competitive information gathering and the use of marketing research surveys as a guise for selling.

Many consumers does not appreciate the intrusive nature of marketing research, whether this involve questions relating to age and income, being stopped in the street or phoned in their homes. Of course, care needs to be taken so that research findings are not misused. For example, individuals in a client organisations may have an interest in the outcome of the research. In such circumstances, it may be tempting to relay the most favourable outcome.

Does social media have a part in traditional research, and is it equally troublesome in ethical matter? This is a something that at first seems clear: as social media marketing strive to be user-related, it should obviously be more ethical since the prospective clients themselves are taking care of much of the marketing. However, while most researchers for social media accept the need of being objective where there is room for a number of interpretations or findings, there are problems. For example, censoring criticism and present more favourable views can be overpowering. The methods used to gather competitor intelligence can raise ethical questions. Questionable practices in the European Union have shown to include social media companies using student projects to gather information without the student revealing the sponsor of the research.

The practice of marketing research in disguise is a danger to the whole social media marketing idea. Despite that it is not usually practised by bona fide social media marketing companies, but rather by selling companies who use social media marketing research as a tool for their means. It is the social media community that suffers from its aftermath.

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