EthicalVoices

Darryl Salerno, the owner of Second Quadrant Solutions, which has helped more than a hundred small, mid-sized and large agencies improve their performance and profitability, discusses a number of key ethics issues, including:

• Why you can't buy your clients televisions
• The ethics of time sheets

Scott Monty, a neoclassical digital executive who led Ford's digital and social media, discusses:

• The perils of obfuscation
• The top ethics challenges facing communicators today
• How many tech companies are ethically challenged
• Ethics advice from the classics that is still relevant today

Joining me is Bonnie Upright, the vice president of corporate communications for Coldwell Banker Vanguard. She is a former agency owner who has done outstanding work with celebrity foundations.

Bonnie discusses ethics issues including:

- Grappling with difficult ethical issues early in your career

- Ethical issues and best practices for managing celebrity and athlete foundations

- The story behind her mother's viral obituary and how it has been plagiarized more than a dozen times

Patrice Tanaka, co-founder of three award winning PR and marketing agencies and currently, the Chief Joy Officer at Joyful Planet discusses number of key topics including:

• What questions should you ask to make sure you are hiring ethical people?

• How can you really demonstrate to your employees the importance of living your ethical code?

• Should you only hire people that know ballroom dancing?

Gary McCormick, APR, Fellow PRSA is a leading expert on communications and the energy industry. He shares his ethics insight on topics including:

• How to ethically build bridges on controversial topics and issues

• Five questions to always ask when dealing with a problem

• How is social media impacting environmental communications

• Putting trolls in perspective

• The ethical challenges of PR professionals being active on social media

In a wide-ranging conversation, Fred Cook, the Chairman of Golin and the Director of the USC Center for Public Relations discusses a number of important issues, including:

• Why understanding communications is not enough for ethical PR pros

• Where there is a disconnect between CEOs and PR pros

• Thriving as the challenge of fake news increases

• The business impact of ethical lapses by agencies

Lou Capozzi, the former chairman of MSL, and former president of the PRSA Foundation, shares some great insight including:

- Why you must be careful who you trust

- What every in-house PR pro needs to be ready to do

- How to determine what brands you will represent

- The importance of being skeptical

Matt Kucharski, the President of Padilla, a public relations agency that builds, grows, and protects brands worldwide discusses how good organizations can learn from ethical challenges. He also shares some great advice on:

• Four ethical challenges PR agency employees can face

• How to use agency values to work through client conflicts

• How to best deal with unethical client behavior

• Why ethics training should not be an annual checkup

Michael Smart, a leading media relations trainer and coach discusses ethical pitfalls PR pros may face in media relations and shares practical advice on how to avoid them, including:

• Why you should always choose ethics over revenue

• Ethical challenges in media relations

• Why every PR pro needs a freedom fund

Cheryl Procter-Rogers, APR, Fellow PRSA, a PR and business strategist discusses:

- What to do when you are asked to spread bad information about a competitor

- Tips for creating an ethical decision framework

- How NASCAR helped her fight confirmation bias