Practice the Ethical Theory in Public Relations: Confessions of a Public Relations Intern

 

 

 

In a working environment, it is the moral philosophy to be ethical in your decision making. It based on the working values, honesty, fairness, loyalty and respect in between stakeholders and individuals. It is all about on how honesty the business dealing is.

The ethical duties are applicable in Public Relations for the client, the society, within the profession, and among the employees in compromising with others under the standard code of ethics. It is important to analyze the ethical decisions to avoid any ethical dilemmas. Sometimes it depends on the situation for example when under pressure the decision making can cause conflict needs  and interest in between the relationship in the organization and the external stakeholders.

Recently at Momentum Forum Events it had been hectic in seeking sponsors. With Men In Black Ball night around the corner, the time is crunching. By this time, any updates on corporations joining for premium sponsorship would be exciting news to Momentum.

Recently there is an interested corporation in joining Momentum. This  premium sponsor is a high profile corporation and due to privacy concerns I will not mention it in this blog. Momentum Forum Events managed to get this premium sponsor on board. Veritably this is really good news for Momentum in gaining exposure. The interested party had communicated back and forth which even included logos to be released and authorized to be printed on the Men In Black flyer.

During that time the Men In Black flyer was reprinted with the added sponsor’s logo. There were around 2000 flyers printed. The flyers were to be distributed to the main clients and stakeholders of the company. Later that week, the sponsor contacted Momentum. Unfortunately they are no longer on board with the sponsorship. Reason being was the company did not meet the requirements on having a specific registered license for a charity to apply with the sponsor’s program. There is a legislation needed from their side.

This seemed unexpected, with the flyers being printed and distributed, with the logos of the sponsor being released by the authorizer this was an unfair bargain to Momentum when the sponsor bailed at the last minute.  

It was not Momentum at fault but the misleading confirmation from the other side of the sponsor corporation verified that they were agreeing to sponsor for Momentum. In short it was poor ethical decisions made from this specific sponsor marketing department in which they claim to deliver but was unable to. This was not expected from such a high profile company. It was a public relations disaster. Momentum Forum Events had to stop distributing the flyers and make amendments which was time consuming and costs money to redesign.

This is my main point with the essence of ethics in decision making; one must follow the standards and qualities in building trusts and maintaining relationships with other clients. Even though, this was an unfortunate turn of events, the communication building between Momentum and the specific sponsor is still under professional terms. I have learnt that the performance to overcome controversial and conflict issues is to face the problem and solve them to avoid any negative perceptions. 

The specific corporation that could not deliver apologized on behalf and made amends by keeping their bargain in exposing Momentum by providing sustainable management in promoting Men In Black Ball 2013. Therefore in conclusion, the importance of ethics is to address morality in influencing others to practice responsibility through policies and activities. This is socially expected in the working place that should be practiced ethically to increase the corporate social responsible performance among the internal and the external stakeholders.     

 

Below is a Cartoon image to put some humor in relevance to my situation. Have a good day ahead everyone.



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Business is business...

 Now this is a fairly soft post, about a situation that I encountered in my time interning but I think it addresses an important point at the end...

Anywhere you go in life you are going to come across people you dislike for whatever reasons. There’s always been people you don’t get along with in school, people you don’t see eye to eye with in university when you are doing a group assignment, or even has just rubbed you up the wrong way at some stage or another in your however many years you spend studying. They could have even just pushed cut you off when you’re running for that last free computer in the library, whatever it is - it happens.

Now going in to this internship I thought I figured I would be dealing with generally like-minded people, but as always I was prepared that everything wasn’t going to be easy, and I’m going to have to deal with difficult people. I’m prepared for that, and I can usually handle it just by tying to be doing whatever needs to be done and just being understanding about the whole situation, they probably have their reason for being however they are.

Now from my last post I mentioned I am working within the music business, with a concert promoter. An industry that is notorious for big-egos and obnoxious, difficult people. Many of the people I have had to work with have been great, and speak to me as a real person.

For the last few weeks I have been working with the director of this company to organise and promote a tour for another international band. That was all pretty straight forward, he assigned me a few small roles, like announcing the event on the blog, managing the Facebook event page, getting in touch with the printers for getting the posters and flyers made. Those bits were easy. Before that however, when choosing the local support acts with him was the difficult part, more particularly dealing with one extremely difficult person...

So it turns out one of the people from the support bands didn’t see eye-to-eye over something else in the past. It was never really resolved, in fact never resolved at all. I was assigned the role of contacting him and asking if his band would be willing to play the event. From his first email back to me it was that same arrogant attitude I had dealt with previously. However now I’m in the real world, I’m representing a company. I had to bite my tongue and make this work. As much as I dislike the guy his band definitely would pull people to the show (I’m not going to mention his band name, for fear of him seeing it and creating a situation), they are one of the more popular local bands in this scene. However, business is business and his band agreed to play.

Again, I would love to post more information about the event on here because it’s going to be great, (however my time interning with the company will be up by then…) but given the situation and this is in public domain, it’s probably best we keep all parties anonymous for now…