The Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) has just published its consultation document on social media. It’s now available via a link on president Tony Bradley’s blog.
It’s great that CIPR is taking an active interest in social media and its impact on professional practice, especially give the shenanigans earlier in the year between the blogging community and Colin Farrington.
I’ve downloaded the full paper and will be taking a proper look through over the next few days, and will post my thoughts then, as well as passing them directly to the institute.
My first reaction when I heard that CIPR was going to be publishing a guidance note or code of conduct for social media, was to question whether such a document would be necessary?
Social media gives the PR practitioner another set of tools with which to build relationships and influence perception, so is the CIPR’s existing code not enough? The principles we should uphold in our professional are the same, regardless of whether we’re blogging, issuing news releases, running stakeholder events or producing podcasts.
I sense from Stuart and Richard‘s posts that they’re thinking along the same lines.
That aside, I’ll hold off any further comment until I’ve read through the paper properly. I’ve published the text of the paper on Google Docs, and will make detailed comments and annotations there (it’s at docs.google.com/View?docid=dgn42txf_12g9wkt7). If anyone would like to add their thoughts there do drop me a line and I’ll add you as a collaborator on the document.
UPDATED: Philip Young also has a good post about this.