This is the tale of two corporate spokespeople who committed online ethical gaffes. Neither of these stories is breaking news, but together, they represent an interesting contrast between two markedly different ends of the social media ethics spectrum.
The story of Little Weasel is one of anonymous blog commenting run amok. On January 29, a popular Irish blogger, Sabrina Dent, blogged about her experiences with Moli, a Dublin-based start-up that Dent described as “social networking for grownups.” She writes that she was impressed by the service which emphasizes its privacy controls in its marketing. She says upon sign-up that Moli “broke her heart.”
“For all the positioning and talk of ‘protecting your privacy’ MOLI fails at the most basic hurdle. Because it doesn’t cloak new joins; in fact, it has to be displaying them somewhere, because within 15 minutes of joining, the spam started.”
Here’s where the fun begins. A visitor to the blog, Hawk5721 (hereafter known as Little Weasel) left a comment in support of Moli “MOLI is awesome. Exactly what grown ups and business have been waiting for.”
A little snooping by readers of the blog revealed Little Weasel’s comment came from inside Moli. When confronted on the blog about his identity, Little Weasel left this obtuse comment “As far as where i work of course i want to stick up for the company that is going to change the market place.”
At that point, commenters let loose with vicious character attacks, obscenities and name calling. Obviously, Little Weasel had received some counsel, as he decided eventually to reveal that he was actually Moli’s Director of Customer Service, in a no longer anonymous comment:
“Please accept my apologies for using my personal alias when commenting to you about some mis-information I believe you blogged about the company. It was my responsibility to include my company name and title. In the future, I will include my name and title in all posts about company information.
In my capacity as Director of Customer Service, I simply wanted to address, in an informal way, some of the issues that you raised which are well intentioned but do not accurately reflect how privacy works on MOLI.
My email is ddifiore@moli.com and I would be happy to address any additional questions that you may have.”
Obviously too little too late. Five months later in fact, Little Weasel continues to receive blogosphere beatings for his gaffe. In fact, we discussed this case study last week at a PRSA panel in Mountain View.
His behavior was inexcusable, but so was Dent’s and that of the visitors to her blog. I will not reproduce here the foul language and names used to describe Little Weasel, but they would shock all but the coarsest of us. In their own way, all of the people who attacked Little Weasel are guilty of a similar ethical violation: using the relative anonymity of the blogosphere to behave in an incredibly uncivil way. If you were to unleash this kind of vitriol in a business meeting, you would find yourself on the street in ten minutes.
As to the original issue, a couple of things are clear. Little Weasel should have known better. He made a gross error in judgment. He was deceptive. He broke a cardinal principal of social media ethics and when confronted, he dug in and continued the deception.
Little Weasel was not guilty of astroturfing, as Dent asserts. Astroturfing is not a single act of misrepresentation in a blog comment. It is a bogus grassroots campaign, an organized, broad based effort at deception, and there is no evidence that Moli embarked on any such thing. This was a single albeit incredibly stupid act by one ill informed person.
Little Weasel did apologize, a bit late in the game, but the merciless beating on the blog and elsewhere continued. This is because, for some, our friend Daniel stopped being a person and became a case study and a stand-in for all companies that don’t “get” social media, privacy, authenticity, etc.
What else can Moli do at this point? They need to do a little internal social media training. They need to keep Little Weasel off of the blogs for a bit. They need to ask themselves how their positioning as a company concerned with privacy affects how they need to conduct themselves in the blogosphere.
Personally, I think Little Weasel has learned his lesson, and I lost all sympathy for Dent and her supporters once the name calling and obscenities were unleashed. I’m not sure who committed the worst of the ethical breaches that took place here.
Enter Big Weasel
Big Weasel is John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, who came under fire last year when it was revealed he used a pseudonym to make derogatory comments about competitor Wild Oats in Yahoo finance forums at a time when Whole Foods was in discussions to acquire Wild Oats.
While investigations were under way, and the company was under the spotlight, Big Weasel took time off from his blog and his other “online diversions.” Now that he’s been cleared by the courts and the regulators, Big Weasel is back with a sweeping blog post explaining why, despite everything that happened, it was OK to do what he did.
My first reaction: shut up John. I lost a lot of respect for Mackey and Whole Foods when all of this came out last year, and I am losing more with this return performance. It’s like finding out that the founders of Ben and Jerry’s had been hanging out with Eliot Spitzer and were referred to in court documents as Clients 10 and 11 respectively. He does apologize in the post, but with so much justification that the apology gets completely watered down.
Let’s look at some of what passes for Big Weasel’s reasoning. In defense of his failure to disclose his identity on the Yahoo forums, Big Weasel (or more likely his corporate communications people) writes:
“In online communities such as Yahoo!, the use of screen names is the normal custom as it allows posters to totally engage in the various discussions and debates that were taking place there. An online screen name is a great ‘equalizer’ between people.”
Nonsense. This would not apply to the officer of a publicly held corporation. Admittedly, some 60-year-old truckers use screen names like hotteencheerleader472, to equalize things, but we expect more from someone in Big Weasel’s position.
“The true identity in the outside world is irrelevant for purposes of participation in these communities.”
Uh, not according to the SEC’s financial disclosure laws (aka “Reg FD“), or Sarbanes Oxley. Officers of publicly held companies have special obligations when communicating materially about those companies.
Big Weasel then goes on to claim an error in judgment. Again — hello? You’re the CEO of a publicly held company. Your campaign on Yahoo was carried out deliberately over a period of years. The fact that you hid your identity is damnable. Your suggestion that you misinterpreted the situation and suffered a monetary lapse in judgment is insulting to your customers and shareholders.
Big Weasel also asserts that he was simply exercising his First Amendment right to free speech. Any first-year journalism student knows that the First Amendment does not guarantee unlimited freedom to speak. It guarantees freedom of speech, which includes the right to be free from harmful speech.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., said in Schenck v. United States “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.” We also have laws against hate speech, and in commercial enterprises, against making misrepresentations of product superiority or company financial performance. These laws are designed to protect consumers, and we know from the excesses and outright theft perpetrated on them by Enron and others during the dot-com bust, that such protections are necessary.
That Big Weasel would play to the obviously liberal bias of Whole Foods’ customers and shareholders with a First Amendment ploy like this is transparent (a new adventure for Mackey) and reprehensible.
I cannot believe that someone as smart as John Mackey, who built the Whole Foods empire, and has been at the helm of the company for 28 years, could not know he was in ethically dicey territory.
A 16-word comment on Big Weasel’s blog sums the situation up quite nicely: “A corporate officer anonymously posting about their own company and their competitors. Seems unethical to me.”
So, in the case of John Mackey, aka Big Weasel, I am unable to find sympathy. He has the public trust, and he represents a corporation who’s fortunes directly affect the lives of thousands of people. He is answerable to all of these people, and to the SEC, FASB, the FTC ahead of his desire to indulge his misdirected sense of justice or need for self expression.
If I ran Whole Foods corporate communications, I would ban Mackey for life from blogging or otherwise having any kind of direct social media presence.
Such are the stories of Little Weasel and Big Weasel. Both men committed ethical lapses, though clearly, of totally different magnitudes. Is one worse than the other? I think so.
Tags: Moli, Sabrina Dent, Whole Foods, John Mackey, astroturfing
