The Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) has submitted commentary to the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) as part of WOMMA's annual Ethics Code review.
For its annual Ethics Code review, the WOMMA Members Ethics Advisory Panel considered two questions relevant to issues currently affecting digital marketing, public relations and communications professionals: disclosure within social media contests and data scraping.
Below are points of focus addressed by PRSA in its commentary to WOMMA, which is available for download.
- Disclosure of relationships, motivation, compensation and other pertinent factors should be the basis of all forms of marketing and communications, including emerging practices like social media and online contests.
- Marketers must reasonably inform consumers of the motivations and intent of use behind the messaging they receive, no matter the medium used.
- The breadth of social networks and how far they reach places a greater importance on disclosure within every message, blog post, tweet, etc. that mentions a contest.
- Where practical, social media contests should provide a link to a clear and simple Web page noting all of the uses for the contest, the information submitted as part of the contest and to whom that information will be given to and for what purposes.
- A material connection exists between a brand and a blogger when the blogger writes about and/or discusses his or her contest entry in any format (blog, Tweet, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.).