ethicscrisis.com

Companies will pay a price if they fail to meet society's expectation that they act ethically. Merely obeying the law, or following compliance guidelines to the letter is not enough, writes Marc Gunther in Fortune. Companies need to meet their "moral liability" or face bigger threats from customers than from government or courts.

Sometimes the price will be damage to a brand or reputation. Other times, the cost will be more concrete, in the form of lawsuits, damage awards or lost sale," Gunther says. The good news is that "...all these social issues present opportunities as well as threats... the best way for business to avoid "moral liability" - become part of the solution instead of part of the problem."

He cites the examples of Nike and The Gap, who didn't break the law, but came under attack for allowing sub-standard working conditions in overseas factories; and Microsoft, Yahoo and Google who came under attack for helping the Chinese government censor the Internet.

Timberland tells customers that its shoes and boots are made in factories where workers' rights are protected. The same goes, now, for Nike and Gap. Toyota sells lots of hybrid cars, mostly because of rising oil prices but also because of the concerns over climate change. General Electric's "ecomagination" initiative aims to profit by selling products that save energy and reduce emissions.

Posted by BL Ochman at 07:38 PM | Permalink

There were unethical practices in the diamond industry, Eli Izhakoff, chairman & CEO of the World Diamond Council told The Jerusalem Post, but that was "true for the 1990s." That was then, the industry wants the public to believe, and this is now.

In anticipation of the negative portrayal of the diamond industry by the upcoming film, "The Blood Diamond," starring Leonardo DiCaprio, The World Federation of Diamond Bourses is launching a pre-emptive PR campaign beginning with a new code of ethics. The ethics code, the Post reports, is "an effort to boost consumer confidence and restore credibility to the industry."

The code, among other things, prohibits child labor, conflict, money laundering and "blood diamonds". A Web site about diamond facts in will launch in August in an effort to educate the public and alleviate consumer concerns regarding the origin of their diamonds.

Members of diamond exchanges around the world will be required to sign a document verifying that they know and understand their ethical obligations to the code of principles of diamond production in order to receive the WFDB Mark.

It will take more than a website to convince the MySpace generation that the issues raised by the movie are not valid. The industry needs to heed the power of consumer driven content because it is quite likely that this issue will soon generate consumer created advertising on You Tube and in other social media.

Posted by BL Ochman at 03:47 PM | Permalink

What qualifies one to teach ethics? Do these qualifications for a business ethics professor strike you as just a bit vague?

According to the job announcement the ideal candidate for a professorship in business ethics at Belk College of Business and University of North Carolina will have a Ph.D. in Philosophy, Management, Business Administration, or a related field, and a distinguished research record in business ethics that warrants appointment to an endowed professorship.

Posted by BL Ochman at 06:22 PM | Permalink

I was out of work for a while before I started my new job. A week after I started, my boss told me to send a written performance warning to a man I now supervise. It would be his second warning, and if he screwed up again, he'd be fired. I didn't want to do it because I really didn't know enough about his record. He's in his 50s, and he's been there 5 years. I know it'll be hard for him to get another job. I didn't want to risk my job, so I did it.

Posted by BL Ochman at 06:08 PM | Permalink

Machine translation has a lot of enemies, although some of them can be even more pedantic than the machines themselves. Some critics, for example, take a paragraph from Joseph Conrad or Henry James and feed it to Babelfish or to some other free machine translation services available online.

The results are often hilarious, but rather than demonstrating that machine translation does not work, they show that critics often don'tt have a clue about the real issues with machine translations. The biggest issue in machine translation of multilanguage advertising, marketing and consumer information is the impossibly high cost of high post-editing.

The fact is, it is often cheaper, and faster to have multilanguage marketing content correctly translated by a literate human to begin with, rather than having it corrected after a machine translation screws it up.

Post-editors take the machine output and transform it into something that can be easily read and understood by human beings, while remaining as faithful as possible to the source text.

Experts agree that the current issue with translation software is about selecting the right texts for the software to work on, and even having the source texts written in such a way that the machine can "understand" them.

This means keeping sentences short, sticking to the Subject-Verb-Object structure, avoiding convoluted syntax and staying away from metaphors and other semantic devices.

Unfortunately, such writing excludes the use of emotional and/or aesthetic context that is the heart of advertising and marketing copy.

There is no credible substitute for a certified multilanguage translation of marketing and advertising materials by a professional translation service like SRF Global Translations. Don't leave English without us.

Posted by BL Ochman at 05:14 PM | Permalink

Global Services points out that each word in the 168-word Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley costs the U.S. economy billions of dollars each year.

"This, says the editorial, "at a time when companies are under severe pressure to become lighter and innovate more as global competition intensifies. No Chinese or Indian company is being made to spend 15% of IT budgets on compliance (Gartner’s numbers)."

Posted by BL Ochman at 04:38 PM | Permalink

"Though it is unlikely that it will be acted upon by the current Congress," The Madison, Wisconsin Capital Times advises Wisconsin's House members should sign on as co-sponsors of the "genuine federal lobbying reform bill introduced last week by U.S. Reps. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., and Marty Meehan, D-Mass." in response to recent revelations of lobbying and ethics abuses sweeping Capitol Hill.

"Though it is unlikely that it will be acted upon by the current Congress, Shays-Meehan bill now. Then voters will know in November whether their representatives are part of the problem in Washington or part of the solution."

Or just part of the game.

Posted by BL Ochman at 04:36 PM | Permalink

Politicians have nothing on Ethics Crisis' anonymous ethics confessions. That's why it's refreshing to read that instead of clipboard and whistles, counselors at Ethics and Leadership Camp for politicians and public officials wore "moral compasses" around their necks, in an effort to create "a culture of ethics and accountability," according to Judy Nadler, a former mayor of Santa Clara and a senior fellow at the university's Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, the host and sponsor.

The New York Times reports that the two dozen or so campers — including local city council members and ethics officers from Texas and Arizona — were "a veritable optimists' club."

Dean J. Chu, a council member from nearby Sunnyvale, chose to go to camp "as a continuing reminder of how you should behave." Mr. Chu added, "Unfortunately, the kind of people attending are not the ones who need to."

Next month in Scottsdale, Ariz., the entire workforce of 2,700, from garbage haulers to the mayor, will be trained in a citywide ethics initiative, according to Teri J. Traaen, the city's general manager for human resources and a co-chairwoman of the initiative.

Even Providence, R.I., where Vincent Cianci Jr., former longtime mayor, is serving a federal prison sentence, is working on an ethics code.

"I don't think we've become more unethical," Ms. Traaen said, referring to the ethics crises that pop up daily in the news. "I think we're more candidly talking about it."

On June 27th, the Center kicks off the Character Education Ethics in the K-12 Classroom

Posted by BL Ochman at 05:25 PM | Permalink

Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks and seriate entrepreneur has funded a website called sharesleuth, which will focus on "corporate chicanery and securities fraud." The site will initially have a blog format, then, after it proves its worth, go subscription.

Cuban told BusinessWeek.com in an email that he'll buy and sell stocks based on scoops the site uncovers, even before they're published.

"There are a million ugly stories in the financial underground," he wrote. "We plan on finding and sharing and profiting from them." He declined to comment further.

Businessweek explained:

"Under the law, Cuban must disclose his interest in the securities Carey covers and Carey's stories must be true, according to Mike Missal, a partner at Kirkpatrick & Lockhart Nicholson Graham specializing in securities regulatory matters. "Then they'll probably be OK," Missal says.

Posted by BL Ochman at 02:51 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

Global marketers would be wise to pilot blog-based marketing campaigns in France because it's one of the most Internet-savvy countries on earth, says Eric Kintz of HP on his Marketing Excellence Blog. But don't let your message get lost in a bad machine translation, says Sloan Friedman, president of SRF Global Translations.

The French blogosphere is greatly underestimated by Technorati statistics, Kintz notes, and France has become one of the major blogging countries in the world. The French have been online since the early 80s, so it should be no surprise that 73% of French Internet users know what a blog is, 28% visit blogs, with 7 million French reading blogs each month.

Since the early 80s, wen nine million free terminals of the French Minitel system were distributed, users could make online purchases, make train reservations, check stock prices, search the telephone directory, and chat in a similar way to that now made possible by the Internet.

Pilot Your Online Campaign in French
So if you want to test a global blog-based marketing campaign, consider kicking it off in France, in French. But if you do, don't even think of trusting the translation of your marketing materials to Google translations. Make sure you have certified translation service like SRF Global Translations translate your marketing and advertising materials into nuanced, localized literate translations.

Here's an example of how Google translations can screw up a translation that could cost you sales, or worse:

Original English
A faux pas in your French translation of marketing or advertising materials could be incredibly costly. Don't count on Google, which did this translation into French, to do the job.

Google Translation to French:
Les pas d'un faux dans votre traduction française de marketing ou de matériels publicitaires ont pu être incroyablement coûteux. Ne pas compter sur Google, qui a fait cette traduction dans le Français, pour faire le travail. (google to french)

Google translation of its French back to English:
The steps of a forgery in your French translation of marketing or advertising materials could be incredibly expensive. Not to hope on Google, which made this translation in the French, to do the work.

As you can see, much can be lost in translation.

Posted by BL Ochman at 02:15 PM | Permalink

Revelations that the Japanese central bank governor, Toshihiko Fukui, owned $90,000 of a stock fund accused in an insider trading scandal have raised an ethics issues for the bank and helped cause not only the biggest sell-off in Tokyo's stock market since 9/11, but also a political firestorm, according to The New York Times.

A Bank of Japan spokesman, Takashi Yoshimura, denied that there is an ethics issue, saying that the bank's ethics guidelines only required employees, including Mr. Fukui, to report internally any purchases or sales of stocks, and any profits, and did not limit where they could invest their money.

In the most understated comment of the year, Mr. Fukui apologized during a meeting of Cabinet members. "I'm sorry," he said. "I have created a fuss."

"At the very least, it is a warning that the bank needs to tighten its ethical standards," said Naoki Iizuka, chief economist at the Dai-Ichi Life Research Institute.

Posted by BL Ochman at 12:08 PM | Permalink

Yesterday, Steve Rubel at Micropersuasion spotlighted a post in Luca De Fino's Italian blog, Fluido, about how to monitor your brand online. Since the original was in Italian, he also linked to a Google translation of the post. It was complete gibberish, as machine translations so often are. Since every business needs to monitor its brand online, SRF Global Translations is providing a certified English translation (below) of the post and the comments it generated, created by a literate human as a public service to the global business blogging community.

Read the Google translation for a laugh. But think about how serious it could be if you used Google or BabelFish to translate something said about your company on the Internet. Every sentence in an incorrectly translated non-English blog post about your company could be a PR minefield, says Sloan Friedman, president of SRF Global Translations.

Here's SRF Global Translations' certified correct English translation of the Fluido post.

(you can always receive automatic updates through customized RSS feeds based on your own search keywords):
_ feedster
_ technorati
_ IceRocket
_ google.com/blogsearch
_ blogpulse
_ yahoo news
_ google news
_ msn news
_ pubsub

Email Alerts
Personalized alerts, created ad hoc by users.
Alerts are automatically sent by e-mail, whenever articles/posts/comments matching user-defined topics get published online.
_ google alert
_ yahoo alert

Message Board & Forum Tracking
search engines dedicated to forums and message boards
_ boardreader
_ forumfind
_ big-boards
_ boardtracker
_ ivillage
_ yahoo message board
_ msn money

Message Groups Tracking
search engines dedicated to message groups
_ yahoo groups
_ aol groups
_ msn groups
_ google groups

Competitor web pages tracking
_ copernic tracker
_ website watcher
_ watch that page

Trend Analysis Tools
“Special” tools (offered by some search engines) that help visualize through charts the popularity of user-defined search terms.
_ blogpulse
_ technorati
_ google trends

….to get an idea of stories that generate a “buzz” in the blogosphere:
_ memeorandum
_ blogniscient
_ digg

….to get an idea of bloggers’ opinions, both positive and negative:
_ opinmind

….to check the number of visitors in a blog, as well as its reliability and popularity:
_ pubsub
_ alexa
_ IceRocket
_ technorati

….for research on bloggers' identities, as well as forums' and select newsgroups' editors’.
_ whois
_ betterwhois
_ ajaxwhois

…for round-the-clock monitoring of social networks, such as:
_ myspace
_ msn spaces

update

monitor this
keotag
bloginfluence
oodle
planetfeedback
yahoo video
google video
blogsearch.ask.com
techmeme

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 30th, 2006 at 10:08 am and is filed under consumer generated media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

10 Responses to “mini-guide to CGM monitoring”
1. Ozgur Alaz Says:
June 11th, 2006 at 8:17 pm
Great lists
thanks

2. Paul fabretti Says:
June 13th, 2006 at 2:58 pm
Fantastic! Probably more important than the much used Web 2.0 directory. everyone is desperate to get some sort of metrics on the blogosp[h]ere and CGC - this is a very useful list!
Thanks

Paul
3. Massimiliano Says:
June 13th, 2006 at 3:55 pm
I'm not sure if you’re aware that Steve Rubel – one of the most important bloggers in the world (micropersuasion.com) – has mentioned your article... congratulations!

4. Easton Ellsworth Says:
June 13th, 2006 at 4:16 pm
Grazie! I don’t speak Italian, but Google helped me translate this page and I want to say thank you for providing this excellent list of search tools.

5. MondoBlog Says:
June 13th, 2006 at 6:20 pm
A list of tools for online monitoring of your own brand
Fluido has compiled a great list of all online tools that can be used to monitor one’s own brand.
Not to be missed!
…
6. Googlisti.com – letting know is more important than letting ignore - Says:
June 13th, 2006 at 8:00 pm
[…] A guide to monitoring web sites, June 13 2006. A notice to those working in the Web: Fluido has compiled an extremely useful inventory of tools for monitoring one's own brand, which is a list of indispensable resources in the over-crowded blogosphere world! […]

7. B.L. Ochman Says:
June 13th, 2006 at 10:16 pm
This list is a great resource. Why not start a wiki and let people add to it so it stays up to date?

8. BoumBlogCommunication » Links of June 13 Says [in French]:
June 14th, 2006 at 1:30 am
[…] Fluido: Outils Web 2.0 to help monitor one’s own brand online. I especially like Google Trends; […]

9. fluido Says:
June 14th, 2006 at 7:45 am
@b.l ochman
thanks. i do agree with you. a wiki would be the best solution to keep this list up to date.

10. Lee Odden Says:
June 14th, 2006 at 12:23 pm
gada.be is also an excellent resource for monitoring multiple tag based search properties and you can output an opml for importing into your RSS reader.

Related Ethics Crisis blog entries:
- SRF Global Translations Demonstrates the Difference Between Machine and Human Translations
- CAT vs Machine Translations: Cardiologist vs Proctologist

Posted by BL Ochman at 12:41 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

Stephen Baker writes on Blogspotting that Joey Vento, owner of Geno's, the legendary cheesesteak shop in Philadelphia, is now being sued for posting a sign demanding that patrons order in English. Read the hundreds of comments the Philadelphia Inquirer's article has generated, and you can see that Philly's bursting with English-centric cheesesteak lovers.

In addition to 168 contentious comments, the Inquirer posts audio of interviews with customers - a good use of social media.

Maybe a sandwich shop in Philadelphia can insist that all of its customers speak English, but global businesses certainly cannot. Nor can companies rely on ridiculously poor machine translations from Google and Alta Vista's BabelFish.

Posted by BL Ochman at 12:35 PM | Permalink

"I ask that all Americans demonstrate in their personal and public lives... the high ethical standards that are essential to good character and to the continued success of our Nation."

Posted by BL Ochman at 12:22 PM | Permalink

Expanding globally? The world of international direct marketing is complex, and partnering with a company that has in-depth knowledge of the local market, the language and relevant legislation can be the key to your success, according to BtoB online.

When selecting a list broker, you'll need to consider "the all-important language issue: Do you plan to communicate in English or to translate into the local language?" asks Mediaprisme U.K. Director Denise Henderson-Cleland. "The only way to tell if a contact is proficient in English is by selecting someone who either reads an English-language publication, has attended an English-language event, purchased from another mailer who recruits in English or who is a known English-speaking expatriate. If you are not sure, don't write in English is the rule."

SRF Global Translations specializes in the multilanguage translation of compliance and marketing materials for multinational companies. Don't leave English without us.

Posted by BL Ochman at 05:10 PM | Permalink

These sound like multilanguage translations, but really, Pop Culture Translator is translating the English words of pop stars to intelligible English.

Tongue firmly in cheek, this viral promotion for Canadian College of English Language in Vancouver makes the point about the importance of correct translation while making you roll on the floor laughing. The site provides deadpan English translations of the words and lyrics of Gollum from "Lord of the Rings," Brad Pitt in "Snatch," 50 Cent, BYOB, and Ozzie Osbourne. It's hard to pick a favorite, but I sure loved Ozzie.

Hat tip to Mike Sussell

Posted by BL Ochman at 04:25 PM | Permalink

I posed as a potential customer in order to get pricing information from my competitors...

Posted by BL Ochman at 04:06 PM | Permalink

What is plain language use in one language can become poetry – or gobbledygook - in another. Gossip, arrows, airplanes, and time can fly. But preferably not in the same sentence.

Advertising text relies heavily on ambiguities and metaphor, which need to be translated on two levels - linguistic and cultural. Humans excel at sorting through ambiguities in their own language to get to what the writer intended to say. Machine translation software simply can’t do that.

Meaning depends on context
The computer is supposed to "understand" what the source text means, and computers have never been good at this, maybe for the simple reason that nobody really knows what understanding is.

Meaning often depends on context. If we come across a sentence such as Time flies like an arrow in a soap opera or during a philosophical debate, we wouldn't hesitate to construe it as a statement about the nature of time.

The same sentence, when uttered in a science fiction movie about entities called time flies -- a type of fly that flies across time -- would become a statement about what these time flies like (they just happen to like arrows).

Finally, if the sentence is heard in a conversation taking place in a microbiology lab where various experiments with flies are taking place, we might have to interpret it as having something to do about a certain method of timing flies.

Grammatical exercise
Grammatically, this exercise means that the language user is supposed to decide instantly whether time is a verb, a noun qualifying another noun, or the subject or the sentence; likewise, whether like is a verb or a preposition.

Translation software, when facing such ambiguities, relies on its internal memory of common sentence patterns based on their probability. Therefore, the above sentence will be always translated according to the first interpretation -- i.e. as a metaphorical assertion on the nature of time.

Literal vs literate translation
Because machine translation software tends to "read" English sentences according to the Subject-Verb-Object pattern, it is difficult, if not impossible for it to correctly construe metaphors or other uses of language that depend on playing tricks with the language itself (such as poetry).

The very sentence Time flies..., by stating that time "flies" employs a metaphor for the time flow that might not be that common in other languages.

At SRF Global Translations, we are devoted primarily to translations of multilanguage marketing materials and campaigns. Exact, localized, certified, natural language translations are crucial to our multinational clients. That’s why we rely on literate humans to create nuanced multilanguage translations.

Posted by Ardian at 11:33 AM | Permalink

I'm off to London til Saturday, June 10th. Will attempt to blog live from there. I'm speaking at e-consultancy's What's New in Online Marketing conference on Wednesday, playing in London after that. Have a wonderful, ethical week.

Posted by BL Ochman at 01:05 PM | Permalink

In a session called International Money-making Opportunities, the sold out eBay Live conference later this month will address how sellers in international markets can more than double their user base and revenues by providing customer support and marketing in different languages.

The Las Vegas conference will launch eBay Blogs and eBay Wikis as sellers' marketing tools, heralding the largest corporate move into Web 2.0 to date.

Sellers large and small have been slow to institute multilanguage marketing programs, despite the fact that much business is ripe for the taking for companies that recognize the opportunity for international growth.

Posted by BL Ochman at 03:09 PM | Permalink

When I worked on a big project with a large team we made, and didn't notice, a huge mistake. My boss blamed my co-worker, but I'm pretty sure the mistake was my fault. I don't like the person who took the fall, so I kept quiet.

Posted by BL Ochman at 03:00 PM | Permalink

The Ethics Web annual Ethics in Action Awards and Business Ethics Magazine's 2006 Business Ethics Annual Award are accepting nominations of companies that are "out ahead of the pack, showing the way ethically." Ethics compliance champions, start your engines!

Posted by BL Ochman at 08:05 PM | Permalink

Oddcast, a media technology company that develops conversational character products has fascinating Text-to-Speech (TTS) software that gives real-time multilanguage conversion of any text to immediate speech by an avatar.

Click on "Talk to me," type in any content and the avatars will say it with the accent of a dozen languages. So, type your content in English and click Japanese, and the avatar says it in English with a Japanese accent.

The software also translates Oddcast's marketing message into a dozen languages, and offers a remarkably effecrive marketing tool for multinational companies.

The company's V-Host software was the power behind Career Builder's immensely successful Monk-email viral campaign that has seen over 7 million unique visitors since January 2006. Over 14 million Monk-e-Mails have been sent, and played.

Posted by BL Ochman at 07:16 PM | Permalink