Thanks to Jim Connolly’s twittering I came across this very interesting article on his blog today. It’s about honesty and trust on-line. What do you think?

I’m in a reflective mood today. Maybe it’s the impact of the election in the land of my American cousins. (Yes, I do have ten of them, spread from Illinois to Florida – quite apart from the more general historical trans-Atlantic “cousinship” of Britain and America).

Whatever the cause, I’ve been thinking about freedom. There are so many places in the world where still there is little or no freedom. Slavery is still not totally conquered. Freedom of conscience is constantly under threat. Freedom of religion is a distant hope for hundreds of millions around the globe. And yet in the United States and my own country, Britain, we have so much freedom that we tend to take it for granted … and run the risk of allowing it to be eroded because we’ve become accustomed to its existence.

But what about freedom for business. The Internet now gives us an enormous freedom to present our various commercial offerings before a global public, but it was not always so. My mind goes back to the early nineties, before the Web. I was then an enthusiast for Compuserve forums, but “crass commercialism” was not on the whole welcomed. And outside the electronic world, on the ground in many countries, freedom to operate any kind of business was a novel experience.

I spent much of my time then in countries of Eastern and Central Europe which only two or three years earlier had been under the control of centralised communist bureaucracies. My role as an adviser was to work with groups of aspiring business people encouraging them to develop businesses with high standards of ethical conduct and to resist the corruption which surrounded them. Initially the biggest challenge was to convince people that this was possible. Freedom was increasingly interpreted as license to cheat, steal and deceive.

Looking to those parts of the world today there are still many challenges ahead, but thankfully there are now many home-grown examples of business with integrity. Freedom with responsibility is more widely understood. Sadly, though, there are too many examples of the opposite in countries which have long been privileged with liberty.

What has this to do with Internet marketing? A great deal, it seems to me. We have tremendous freedom. We need to use it responsibly. Business ethics is not merely a subject for glossy promotional brochures and bureaucratised compliance programs in the corporate world.  It is something for the daily life of every online marketer.