• by Shankar Gupta , February 9, 2005

The Word of Mouth Marketing Association today released a draft of its ethical code of conduct, emphasizing that buzz marketing should be transparent, with "honesty of relationship, opinion and identity."

"Don't lie about your relationship with the marketer. Say what you believe. And don't lie about who you are," summed up WOMMA CEO Andy Sernovitz. He said the word-of-mouth marketing community needed a set of ethical standards to prevent buzz marketing from becoming the new spam.

"It's not a crisis yet, which is why we're getting up there early with this thing," Sernovitz said. "E-mail marketers never got out there and established the rules, and now the good guys have gotten lumped in with the scumbags."

The code itself states: "We stand against shill and undercover marketing, whereby people are paid to make recommendations without disclosing their relationship with the marketer." The code also advises that "campaign organizers should monitor and enforce disclosure of identity."

One of the 17 buzz marketing companies that participated in the creation of the ethics code was BzzAgent, which was featured in a December article in The New York Times. The Times article discussed BzzAgent's promotion of Al Fresco chicken sausages using so-called "agents," not all of whom made full disclosure in the course of promoting--which would apparently violate the new ethics code.

BzzAgent's founder and President, Dave Balter, said that all of BzzAgent's agents are instructed to disclose their identities, but that some do not. "There's a limit to my control, and you can't force people to do anything, but we do everything we can to ensure that people are open and clear," Balter said.

Balter also raised the concern that disclosure might affect the relationship between promoters and consumers, where a promoter--who was already an enthusiastic proponent of a brand--signs up for BzzAgent.

The version of the ethics code released today is a draft copy, intended for public consumption and scrutiny, Sernovitz said. "There will be a formal comments process on our Web site," he said. "This will be an ongoing discussion and revision of this document. There will also be a lot of real-world tests."

There is some disagreement in the word-of-mouth marketing community about the ideas put forward in WOMMA's ethical code, however. Justin Kirby, the co-founder of the Viral & Buzz Marketing Association, said that the dishonest marketing practices that WOMMA's ethics code focuses on are exaggerated. "The focus seems to be all on deceptive practices being a threat to this industry and personally, I think that's a really overblown problem," Kirby said. "It creates a lot of column inches in the media, not least fueled by some of the practitioners."

Kirby cited several "undercover" marketing campaigns, including the promotion of the movie "The Blair Witch Project," which took the form of a site about the fictional documentary that had no overt link to the film's production company. Such an initiative might violate WOMMA's proposed ethics code.

But Balter agreed with Sernovitz that deceptive marketing practices were a big problem facing word-of-mouth marketers. "It's an enormous problem. The way companies are spending time on ways to fool consumers will be the destruction of this industry," he said.