Corporate Social Responsibility & Ethics

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Ethics have been affected by the Internet in two interesting ways. Visit many of the large corporate websites that you may have heard of such as McDonalds[1], or even cigarette manufactures such as Philip Morris[2] or British American Tobacco [3](BAT) and with little effort you will surely find references and pages dedicated to CSR within those organisations. Clearly those organisations place significant importance on CSR to dedicate time, money and marketing expense to such programmes. Whether those programmes are a result of an underlying moral obligation or a result of changes in the external social environment and in true marketing fashion companies are simply reacting to the needs and wants of consumers is debatable.

The Internet has changed the way the media operates as well as the speed and availability of information. The increase in popularity of Organic and ‘Fair Trade’ products is a clear sign of the consumers’ feelings towards ‘doing the right thing’. As a result websites such BSR (http://www.bsr.org) have now been established to assist companies with their CSR programmes buy offering advice and guidance on CSR business practice[4].

Although the Internet in these cases is used to promote or at least communicate the responsible practices of companies to both the media, investors and consumer; the use of the Internet itself and its underlying technologies has also been subject to questionable ethical practice.

There is no doubting the power and importance of a successful ranking on search engines such as Google (http://www.google.co.uk). As such there are marketing companies who provide services and software to assist with page rankings and various search engines[5]. Ethically however, there is a fine line between effective marketing practices, which achieve a successful ranking, and a clear unethical attempt to ‘cheat’ the system. German car manufacturer BMW was the focus of attention for such an ethical dilemma when they used the key word ‘gebrauchtwagen’ meaning ‘used cars’, 42 times on a page redirecting users to their German website (http://www.bmw.de). As a consequence Google removed the BMW site from their listings reducing their Google rank to zero.

Google has in the past, gone to significant lengths to protect and conceal its ranking process because of such attempts to ‘break the rules’ of ethical practice. These lengths culminated in the application to the US Patent Office in March 2005 by Google to protect their ranking process[6], however in doing so they released into the public domain details of the process itself which some may not have known before.

[1] http://www.mcdonalds.com/corp/values/socialrespons.html

[2]http://www.philipmorrisinternational.com/pmintl/pages/eng/press/speeches/ddavies_200205.asp

[3]http://www.bat.com/OneWeb/sites/uk__3mnfen.nsf/vwPagesWebLive/0979C269F4EE8C4280256BF4000331D6?opendocument&SID=&DTC=

[4] http://www.bsr.org/CSRResources/index.cfm

[5] http://www.axandra-web-site-promotion-software-tool.com/

[6] http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PG01&s1=20050071741