IABC Café

Recently, I met Henry Eason, a member of the San Francisco chapter, who told me a story that exemplifies how members can use the IABC network.  It warmed my heart.  It may not warm yours, but I hope you will follow his example, when you are looking for help on a work project.

Here’s the story:

“As public relations and marketing generalists, our firm has represented numerous industries, but sometimes we get a little rusty if we haven’t worked in a particular field in awhile.

“Recently, when we were asked to bid on a project in a field in which we had not worked for almost 10 years, we had to get up to date…fast!

“After searching the Web without much satisfaction, I knew I really need to talk to a vertical market expert.  But who?  I did not want to call a competitor in this area.

“That’s when I decided to go to IABC’s Web site and search for members in other areas of the country who had this expertise.  I visited this page.

“It worked!  Amazingly.

“I used the IABC database to search by “public relations” and the particular industry–and bingo!  Several dozen names came up.  I put in calls to five people, got voice mail and told them I was an IABC member reaching out to them.  Three of them called me back and were happy to speak to me.  One of them was incredibly knowledgeable and generously gave me an excellent briefing.”

That’s the way the IABC network is supposed to work.  I hope you are making it work for you.

I don’t know if this is a follow-up to my post yesterday on moral dilemmas or if it is a new topic, but I was intrigued by an article in yesterday’s WSJ, with the same title as this post. sloanreview.mit.edu/wsj/insight/brand/2008/05/12/

The article did not just treat it as a philosophical question but reported on the results of some experiments conducted at MIT’s Sloan Business school. In the experiments, subjects were shown the same products–t-shirts and coffee. One group was told that the products had been made using high ethical standards; the other group was told the producers had used low ethical standards. Subjects in the groups were willing to reward the ethically produced products by paying higher prices and punished the ones produced by an “unethical” company by paying lower prices.

There are some additional wrinkles to the results, which you can check out by reading the article. For those of us who want companies to behave in socially responsible ways, this experiment provides some research to help us make that case.

This weekend I saw The Counterfeiters, the Austrian film that won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. Based on a true story, it is about a Jewish counterfeiter who works with other concentration camp prisoners to produce counterfeit British pounds and then counterfeit U.S.dollars. With this counterfeit currency, the Germans had the power to disrupt the British and U.S. economies and prolong their war effort.

Clearly the prisoners did not want to do anything to aid the Nazis, but by cooperating with them, they were saving their own lives. That dilemma is the primary conflict between the prisoners.

Yesterday I read an article in the New York Times that mentioned a PR firm that, a few years ago, had served as counsel to the government of Myanmar. That is the same government that has been barring foreign aid workers from the country, preventing disaster victims from getting life-saving aid.

Now, I am not suggesting that this PR firm advised the government to withhold aid from disaster victims. But I doubt that the junta has changed its stripes in the last few years.

But that raises the question–why would a firm accept that business? Does the opportunity to earn a half a million dollars create a moral dilemma? Is there a gray area that I am missing?