e-Business - Strong Ethics or Strong Regulation - Our Choice

It is up to e-commerce industry leaders to set -- and abide by -- ethical standards for social marketing. Will we use valuable new social media tools to help our customers get accurate, useful information? Or will we allow them to be used to obfuscate and mislead in the service of short-term gains? If the latter, we can expect severe regulation -- and we will deserve it.

Ioften hear people express fear at the "threat" of future regulation by a government agency. I have to admit I have the opposite reaction.

As leaders in the world of e-commerce and online communication, we are in the driver's seat to either show that we are serious about ethics -- or that we need adult supervision. As we all know from growing up, when you get adult supervision, you don't always like it, but you often deserved it.

Take social media. It is an amazing new discipline that is in the process of transforming how 1.67 billion people define the way we do business. It's nothing short of a revolution in the making. It's changing our shopping experience worldwide. It represents the best opportunity we have ever had to speak directly with our customers and learn from them. Yet, as new as it is, many of us are not learning along with the advances.

The reason so many communicators and marketers are choosing to ignore this sea change is obvious. People like to make it easier on themselves when transformative change is going on, so they discount it or simply assume they will learn by osmosis. In today's online world, however, if you aren't taking time to become a student of how the world is changing via social media, then you're falling behind on a daily basis. When 500,000 new people go online for the first time in their lives every day, it ain't regular change.