CIPR and the Groucho Club

Many thanks to David Brain and Stephen Davies for standing us a few drinks at the Groucho Club in London last week.
The guys from Edleman met myself and my colleague Simon Collister to discuss the Chartered Institute of Public Relations’ consultation document on its proposed code of conduct for social media. What was so telling was we only spent about 10 minutes actually discussing the document – before moving on to the more interesting stuff about agency life.
My views on the code can be seen on a dreadful video of me at David’s Sixty Second View, as can Simon's. But to elaborate my main problem is that the code seems to me to be unenforceable. Most importantly, those people who have embraced social media as a public relations or marketing tool, already understand the pitfalls of messing around with the Web2.0 community.
Much of what is in the CIPR’s existing code should hold true for Web2.0, but at the end of the day is should be about common sense: be open, be honest, join in the conversation.