WOM Japan to introduce ethics code for blogger marketing

Shige Ota, a founding member of WOM Japan and the president of Japanese public relations firm Bilcom, explained that the organisation would hold a “study meeting” including 100 selected member agencies, IT companies and alpha bloggers, as a preliminary step to establishing guidelines for blogger marketing.

Ota said it would first be necessary to define the term ‘pay-per-post’.

Pointing to a scandal in the US two years ago in which Wal Mart was accused of unethically “incubating” bloggers, he said it was important to learn from past mistakes, and from an existing code developed by WOMMA (the US equivalent of WOM Japan).

“We should create guidelines for bloggers and regulations and guidelines for all agencies and marketers,” he said, adding that it would not be sufficient to transplant the WOMMA code to Japan. “We will need to localise the guidelines. Japanese blogging culture is very different.”

Ota named the three requirements for effective word-of-mouth marketing as being “transparency, authenticity and respect”.

“An agency should not order bloggers to write specific content. This is very negative for the entire industry,” he said.

CyberBuzz, an online agency employed by Google and a WOM Japan Committee member, has been accused of having bloggers place links to the portal’s blog widget campaign in Japan. The agency admitted in a statement that Google provided member bloggers with advertising fees in return for placement of widgets and movies on their sites for a limited period.

The initial group discussion will take place today.