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I talked a couple of weeks ago about how so-called social media can help your company’s branding effort, and what that means about conducting your business. It is pretty obvious that social media is a (relatively) new kind of marketing game, which would seem to imply a new set of rules as well. Given that, I’d like to spend this week to being feeling out the ethical terrain of designing and strategizing with social media.

The pretty clear place to start this (at least according to Google) is looking at the published ethics code for the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA). Word of mouth marketing is the heart of most social media campaigns, and WOMMA has been advocating it since 2005. According to their mission, they employ an ethical code as part of their core strategy.

The Word of Mouth Marketing Association

The heart of the WOMMA code is the so-called "Honesty ROI," a name which should strike at least a tangential chord with us DLB types, given our insistence on the critical role of keeping meaningful promises in all types of corporate design and marketing. The R.O.I. in question here cashes out to: Relationship, Opinion, Identity. This week, my plan is to look at each of these points in turn, and evaluate the stance of the WOMMA against the stance that we’ve been developing. I’ll look for both similarities and disjunctions, either of which will hopefully be instructive in our ongoing investigation of design ethics.

Today, I’ll just paraphrase the WOMMA’s position, and on Wednesday and Friday, I’ll take it up in earnest.

The Honesty of Relationship directive (heretofore, R-rule) consists of three points, all three of which can be paraphrased as a single ought-statement: Marketers should disclose their relationships to the products they’re hyping. (Note: It’s not entirely clear to me that the R-rule doesn’t just collapse into the I-rule. See below.)

The Honesty of Opinion directive (heretofore, O-rule) has (again) two points that can be paraphrased as a single ought-statement: Consumers’ opinions are sacrosanct: Marketers should not enforce their own opinions nor those of the company they represent on consumers.

The Honesty of Identity directive (heretofore, I-rule) has (again, and finally) three points that can be paraphrased like this: Testimonials from people employed as marketers should be disclosed as such. Marketers should not masquerade as average consumers.

For the following week, I’ll be thinking about this code – if it makes sense to me from both a practical and a theoretical standpoint – and I invite you to do the same.