Individual assignment 10

Marketing individual assignment 10 Introduction The recent advances in internet marketing and social networking sites have forced advertisers to explore new opportunities for engaging the audience. The advertisers will continue to have the motivation to fake their product endorsements in order to receive favorable comments from the internet users. Some of the unethical practices in sales lead generation and nurturing include opportunism, dishonesty, breach of privacy and spamming (Solomon and Tuten 9).
Part I
In addition to the above unethical behavior, another unethical behaviour of sales lead generation includes use of malware that alters the external settings of the browsers. In addition, the malware will insert unwanted advertisements in the non-affiliated websites like spawn pop-ups that require the internet user to click the advertisement message (Solomon and Tuten 18).
Another unethical practice in generating and nurturing sales leads is semantic marketing and behavioral targeting. Semantic advertising on the social media involves semantic analytics that can interpret the meaning and the main topic in a subject thus populating such visited websites with targeted advertisements even though not requested by the users. Behavioral targeting involves monitoring the behavior of the internet users especially the websites visited and hours spend on different websites. These practices are unethical since they interfere with the autonomy of the user and lead to other unethical practices such as spamming and violation of privacy and confidentiality of the internet users (Solomon and Tuten 24).
Part II
Behavioral tracking is a practice whereby the advertisers monitor the electronic shopping patterns of the internet users together with the sites visited. In 2011, the Federal Trade Commission announced plans to require the advertisers to permit ‘ do not track’ or ‘ turn off the tracking switch’ and even disclose their monitoring activities (Solomon and Tuten 33).
From the ethical perspective, advertisers should disclose their intentions or permit the internet users to turn off tracking. According to the rights perspective of ethics, internet and social media users have the right to privacy thus advertisers must disclose their intentions or permit the switch off tracking option. It is the right of internet users to control their activities on the internet, their images and information that is shared over the internet. According to the egalitarianism or fairness approach to ethics, disclosing the tracking intentions or permitting the switch off button is fair to users of the internet sites since many advertisers will not accurately disclose the tracking intentions (Solomon and Tuten 56). In addition, virtue ethics require that advertisers embrace honesty, patience and openness thus they must disclose the tracking intentions or allow internet users to switch the tracking button off (Solomon and Tuten 69).
Conclusion
The increase in the use of social media has unlocked new marketing opportunities for advertisers, but has also created ethical dilemmas. The marketers face several ethical dilemmas in protecting the potential customer privacy and in trying to generate a sale lead through use of unethical marketing practices. Some of the ethical dilemmas include behavioral targeting, privacy violation, spamming, public bashing and misuse of free expertise.
Work cited:
Solomon, Michael and Tuten, Tracy. Social media marketing. London: Prentice-Hall. 2012.