Over the course of the last week, while working on social media initiatives for several clients, the following questions or situations came up:

• A client missing an opportunity to engage in a conversation (coupled with desire of agency team members to respond)
• A situation that would require disclosing my (or my agency’s) role in working with a client who wishes to keep the work and our relationship secret
• Working with customer data within social networks, privacy concerns about using the data for targeting
• Agency employees interested in engaging in conversation for a client initiative (on Facebook, Twitter or elsewhere) without disclosing relationships
• A friend, knowing a client relationship, asking if it’s OK to “vent” about that client in social (of course I said yes, and I can hope my client responds and does the “right thing” to help.)

I could share my responses to these issues, but I’d rather hear from you.  So my question is to you: If you work in social media or even work for a company that is leveraging social channels for various purposes, how often do you come across ethical concerns?  What types of issues are your seeing?  Who do you turn to for guidance?

By the way, Todd Defren has a great series called Real World Ethical Dilemmas in Social Media that explore situations in greater detail.  I’m curious how often these come up for you – please describe your role too and thanks in advance.

Photo credit: swiv via flickr