Skip to main content

Charity For Fans – Is It Ethical?

Facebook Fan Pages are becoming the social media platform for most clients today. It solves most of the problems that blogging, podcasting, youtubing and what other web2.0 thingy you can think off. This, however, made the race for fans an inevitable KPI.

Sony Ericsson Singapore recently launched their Fan Page and their drive for fans was unique. Their pull was that for every ten fans who join their Fan Page, Sony Ericsson Singapore will donate SGD1 to the Singapore Children’s Society. Just click a button to join the Fan Page and you do your bit for charity.

Effortless.

At the back of my head, there was a lingering thought asking myself if this is an ethical thing to do. Is one joining this Fan Page because they are supporting charity or is it to support Sony Ericsson? Will we also see an influx of brands going for the same approach for fans?

I tweeted about Sony Ericsson Singapore’s approach and also added that we should get 1 million fans for Singapore Children’s Society to get SGD100,000. As I tweeted about this approach, Jimmy Tang, a friend on Facebook, commented, “$100k for a database of 1 million names. But is it ethical to use charity for commercial benefit? I rather just donate $1 to them directly. It's more than what SE would pay anyway. Scam!”

I explained to Jimmy that Sony Ericsson Singapore was not my client, but it did resonate whether it was right to use charity for commercial benefit.

I asked that question to two PR veterans and their replies were rather interesting.

Said John Kerr, Director at Edelman, “It is ok, but with caveats. Only if there is super-over-the-top transparency that the brand is doing this, that the charity agrees (i.e. there is endorsement on materials and support on their web presence) and it is done in a spirit of fun, whereby SE even says things like ‘you can unsubscribe after 1 April, but we’re expecting to offer lots of goodies and exciting content exclusively to our FB fans – and we promise not to spam.’”

Tom Burgess, Group CEO Bond PR, said “Yes, I think it is OK  to use a charity. If it assists the charity in raising awareness for its cause, generating funds and providing its service, then this is useful for the charity.

“But it has to be genuine, there needs to be more than just a monetary link, Sony Ericsson needs to be associated with the Charity and show more involvement. Eg their staff may give time or they may have run other fund raising events or have history of related cooperation.  If the fans don’t want to continue to be members because they don’t like the stance then they can leave. Similarly the charity needs to feel comfortable with the brand that is donating.”

I Googled Sony Ericsson and their involvement with Singapore Children’s Society. The mobile phone vendor, indeed, was quite active with the Singapore Children’s Society over the years, but information is quite scattered.

Maybe they should make use of this Fan Page to create awareness of their CSR activities with the Singapore Children’s Society to share with their fans that their involvement is not a one-time act of goodness.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Singapore radio personality in "hot soup" for reporting train delays based on Tweets?

Update - Hossan Leong has commented on this post to say " I'm not in trouble pls don't blow this out of proportion. Let it rest. It's getting silly. Thank you for your love and concern and I apologize for any misunderstanding." ~  Hossan Leong. Hossan Leong, a Singapore radio personality for The Gold Breakfast Show on Gold 90.5, was censured today for reporting on train delays on the Circle Line because he based the information on Tweets, rather than waiting for the official reports from the Circle Line operator, SMRT.  It is, however, unknown if the "warning" came from Mediacorp producers or SMRT. Tweeted Hossan Leong ,  OK...I reported it on air and now I'm getting into trouble for it?? The CC line is DOWN rite? I did nothing wrong rite? The SMRT Circle Line was reported to be down this morning during peak hours and started as early as 7am. However, local news only received official statement was received by the mainstream media at about 9...
14 comments
Read more

DBS Bank – One Tweet too little too late.

(Updated post - DBS apologise with the 3Rs – Will social media bite? ) It was the bluest Monday for DBS/POS Bank in its entire banking history when more than 1000 of their ATM and online banking services were taken offline due to a software upgrade an outage (PR announced that it was down due to software upgrade, but the outsourcer, IBM, later claimed it was an outage). So on that Monday, DBS decided to sign up onto Twitter and post a 140 characters one-liner onto Twitter to post a one liner to inform the Twitterverse of the down time. Everybody knows that if you just create a new account on Twitter, you would start off with 0 friends. How would you be able to inform the Twitterverse if you start with 0 friends? DBS Bank did something smart to insert the #dbs and #posb and that probably drew some attention to this account. However, the effectiveness of the tweet was lacking as it drew only 28 retweets. As of this posting, DBS Bank attracted 274 followers. A letter to T...
9 comments
Read more

New field in SocialPR: Social Media Crisis Communications

I have been busy with family for the Lunar New Year week but it seem the Singapore blog-o-sphere was active, and is still is, about recently formed Association of Bloggers (Singapore), ABS for short. To cut a long story short, the announcement of ABS via mainstream media didn’t go down well with Singapore bloggers and in the end resulted in some speculation to why ABS was set-up in the first place. A post by the ABS president defending herself against a harsh criticism from a blogger added to the bad start and created even more speculation that ABS was set-up with an ulterior motive. A week later, some founding members of the pro-team started posting up notice of resignation on their blogs and this just added fuel to fire. Again, a story of ABS appeared in mainstream media and this lead to even more disgruntled bloggers asking why the president isn’t responding via her blog or the association’s blog. I also responded to a post about the ABS incident. You can catch a summary of...
6 comments
Read more