Ethics is a highly important part of social media, in order to build sufficient and trusting relationships between brands and their clients, ethical issues must be addressed.
There are no laws as of yet with who owns what in the social media cyberspace, but this is becoming an increasingly important issue, that the government must act on. I have chosen to focus on The Body Shop as they are renowned for their feelings towards ethics with their products, and I was interested to see if they had the same feelings towards this with social media. Through doing a quick search on Twitter, I was able to find their UK Twitter page. It is clear to see that their Twitter page is being used to communicate their products with customers, but it is also being used to promote its ethical feelings too, with their last tweet focusing on Earth Hour. Twitter is increasingly being used by companies as a “way of staying connected, especially with the use of apps and mobile technology” (Krishnamurthy, Gill and Arlitt 2008).
Realising their ethical focus within social media, I decided to look at their website, and find out what their feelings were on the ethical issues of data mining and dataveillance. Their privacy policy has a specific section relating to matters on the internet; here they openly say that their website uses cookies however you can choose to decline cookies, however having had a play around on the website, it is not straightforward and easy to do this.
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