Developing Ethical Guidelines for WOM

Question … how can you establish guidelines for something that is still being created and still be understand by its practitioners? I dunno.

Yet, that’s exactly what we at WOMMA are trying to do with establishing ethical guidelines for WOM.

My take is to publish a set of general, but well-defined WOM core values and seed them with marketers. Once these core values begin to take root, we then start to built a WOM culture and through this culture-building, social norms for WOM will develop.

Ultimately shouldn’t it be up to us to self-police ourselves and not to any definitive list of guidelines?

Can’t we TRUST ourselves to behave properly?

After all … as advocates for WOM and customer evangelism, we are challenging businesses to TRUST their customers to take ownership of the brands they promote. As such, we oppose businesses dictating how customers should use their brands.

Why then are we proposing dictating WOM guidelines?

Where’s the TRUST?

We talk about how today’s society of attuned consumers and determined detractors will sniff out anything inauthentic and inappropriate. And once they do sniff out the crap, they will go to the mountaintops and tell the whole networked world about it.

Consumers will police us. And we will police ourselves.

Do we have enough TRUST in consumers to believe they will police us? Can we TRUST ourselves enough?

So … why the need to dictate guidelines for WOM when we supposedly have all this TRUST?

(Yep, you guessed it. I’m a Libertarian.)