Viral Markeing and Word-of-Mouth Marketing to be Policed
Dec 13th, 2006 by Dan Blank
The Washington Post reports on new guidelines around the hottest buzzword of the decade, “word-of-mouth-marketing.”
“The Federal Trade Commission yesterday said that companies engaging in word-of-mouth marketing, in which people are compensated to promote products to their peers, must disclose those relationships.”
This would have a sweeping affect across the marketing world, and would try to redraw lines that had become hazy on the web. Some examples of such marketing online:
“Word-of-mouth marketing can take any form of peer-to-peer communication, such as a post on a Web blog, a MySpace.com page for a movie character, or the comments of a stranger on a bus.”
As Tony Hung and Brian Clark point out, this could end the reign of many websites that look as though they are providing unbiased information, but are really, ” fake personalities, fake blogs, or paying people on the sly to shill your product…”
Scott Karp points out:
“This is also a bucket of cold water on the use of social networks like MySpace and Facebook to engineer “viral” product recommendations and other such word-of-mouth marketing schemes… Just when you thought it was safe to “monetize” everything “social”…”
Darren Rowse is left with these questions:
- How they’ll police it?
- Whether this will only apply to US bloggers (I’m presuming so)?
- How it will impact sites that have many tens thousands of pages with deep link affiliate promotions already in their archives? Will it be retrospective?
- How they’ll define what is and isn’t a disclosure?