Let’s have a chat about ethics and how it relates to your success in life and business, shall we? The definition of ethics is quite easy to grasp: Ethics is a system of moral principles. Put simply, being an ethical person means you have morals and values and you respect other people.
When you study public relations in college like I did, you learn early on about the importance of ethics to the profession. The Public Relations Society of America even has its own ethics guidelines, the PRSA Code of Ethics. Even if you’re not in the public relations industry, it’s just plain smart to adhere to ethics in any and all professional conduct.
I bring up the topic of ethics because we had an interesting thing happen at the Identity office last week. We discovered that someone in our neighborhood who had recently launched her own PR agency had swiped, verbatim, copy from our website. And, not just any copy. This person had used the exact language we use to describe the four core practice areas of our business (hover over the photos on our home page to see the copy). She even went so far as to find similar photos to go along with the four practice areas and descriptions. To add to that, she took language from the services section on our LinkedIn company page, copy from one of our blog posts and copy from other company websites (which we discovered through some easy cut and paste action in Google).
Luckily, this came to our attention quickly one evening after she had just launched her new agency website. By the next morning, the “PR professional” had removed the language she took from our site.
I cannot for the life of me understand how any professional could think for one minute that it’s acceptable to steal copy from another company’s website (a company in a similar industry and location, at that!). I know people get away with stealing copy online all the time. Content farms that existed for the sole purpose of re-posting other people’s content used to get good SEO juice, but not anymore thanks to Google’s Panda update that knocks down low quality content sites in search rankings.
Aside from that, it’s just plain wrong to steal another person’s or company’s content. It’s unethical. And it’s a whole new level of low when you steal verbatim the way a company defines its services. Doing this, and any other action that falls along the unethical spectrum, is a great way to steer as far away from success as possible in business and in life.
I’m not naive. I know business professionals do unethical things every day and still manage to find success. But, why risk it? There is a big difference between smart, strategic risks in business and downright stupid ones. This example falls in the bucket of the latter.
Here’s my advice: If you ever have to pause for a moment and think that an impending action may even be borderline unethical or come back to bite you some day, don’t do it. It’s not worth it. The people who find true success in business and in life do so through wholesome practices and good old hard work.
What are your thoughts on ethics? Have you ever had a similar situation happen to you?