Three Rules for Ethical Marketing
There are two breeds of internet marketers these days: the ethical and unethical. These the two kinds of marketers have made their living side by side in the past without many problems, but the shift to online marketing has made marketing departments more accountable for their marketing methods and as a result unethical marketing has become more transparent to customers. Because of this transparency, marketing departments are beginning to take the high road when trying to acquire new clients and have stopped using methods that are likely to hurt their brand image such as mass email and phone campaigns. Companies fear losing customers, or even worse starting an anti-company movement because of one bad judgment call in the marketing department.
While considering this at the recent Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco, I started to write down some ideas that I would like to share with other online marketers. I have debated with others these three ideals for online marketing and they are only a few of the values that I hold onto when preparing a marketing campaign for a company or product.