For marketers, good word-of-mouth can be better than good press. But if you're generating fake word-of-mouth by manipulating bloggers into promoting your product, it can come back to bite you.

Seeking to bring some order to the blogosphere, the Word of Mouth Marketing Association is issuing guidelines advising marketers on how to ethically deal with bloggers.

Seeking to bring some order to the blogosphere, the Word of Mouth Marketing Association is issuing guidelines advising marketers on how to ethically deal with bloggers when trying to get them to promote products.

Don't lie, don't misrepresent yourself, don't use automated systems to post comments — those are the obvious ones.

But further down on the list, in an interesting twist, marketers are asked to train bloggers on journalistic ethics. "If bloggers write about products I send them, I will proactively ask them to disclose the products' source," reads one. http://www.womma.org/blogger/

asap spoke with Andy Sernovitz, CEO of the Chicago-based trade group, which boasts hundreds of big brands and public relations firms among its members.

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asap: Why issue these guidelines?

Sernovitz: The blog world is so free and so disorganized. Anyone writes whatever they want. And so, if you're working at company — especially if you're a new employee or junior staffer — you're encouraged to go out there and start blogging.

But, there are rules and there's etiquette and there are ethical guidelines that you need to know.

We wanted to make sure that anybody at any company understands very clearly what's good and what's bad.

asap: Some of these tips cover what we consider journalistic ethics. Why should marketers be the ones to instruct bloggers on the rules?

Sernovitz: Your average blogger hasn't been to journalism school. Your average blogger may not consider themselves a journalist. And then there are all these people at companies who love to be written about. There's this lack of clarity as to what is appropriate and what isn't appropriate.

asap: Just to play devil's advocate for a minute, why do ethics matter? Why not try to sell your product by any means necessary?

Sernovitz: In the end, word-of-mouth is your single most powerful form of marketing. When real people start talking about your company, you'll sell more stuff. To get good word of mouth, your customers have to trust you.

Fifty years ago, you could take a scorched earth marketing path and just sell anything at any cost. Now, consumers are empowered to talk back. And when you burn your customers, when you burn the community, everyone's going to know and they're going to stop buying from you. So, marketing trust is now top of the list for things you need to do.

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Stephanie Hoo is asap's business writer.

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