Cross posted from the WOMMA Blog. The standard live-blogging caveats apply....excuse any initial typos.

After hearing all about the award-winning WOM campaigns, attendees quickly re-convened for a panel discussion on the loss of control. On the panel were:

Gary Stein, Director of Strategy, Ammo Marketing
Rob Gould, Partner, Porter Novelli
Mary Engle, Associate Director for Advertising Practices, Federal Trade Commission

Washington D.C. might be the best town to hold a panel on this topic since politicians are often accused to 'Not getting it'.

First up was Rob Gould. Rob claimed to be net immigrant and not a net native. He's a social psychologist by trade so his roles is to look at how people interact with advertising/marketing. It's not just about control and consumers. People have a broader role than just being a consumer.

Many years ago he was asked about CB Radio, in many ways it's similar to what's going on today. There is a desire for social connection, expression and freedom that drove the CB movement.

We're leaving the era of vertical influence, mass media is giving way to other forms of media. Why do we not here that many jingles any more? What we're entering is a period of horizontal influence. There are four boosters within the horizontal movement.

Power Booster 1 - The ability to share and generate information
Power Booster 2 - Social networking
Power Booster 3 - Consensus Building (yes there is the Wisdom of crowds, but there is also the tyranny of the echo chamber)
Power Booster 4 - Mobilization (we can take our consensus and run with it)

Next up was Gary Stein. The title of his deck was 'Trustiness'. He was looking at what people trust and why they trust those things.

WOM is the folklore of consumer culture. Unfortunately consumers don't trust advertisers and advertisers don't trust consumers. Advertisers don't think that consumers will want to sit though the ads, and of course consumers just want advertisers to not lie. We as marketers can't lie, since there are so many bloggers and other sources out there that will out the truth.

How can we begin to measure trust? Gary presented an equation that possible represents trust (photo coming soon).

Trust will drive confidence for decisions, confidence drives action. People will forgive, lapses in competence , but not benevolence. If we as organizations apologize quickly for errors, we can be forgiven.

This past year there have been three people that have tested our trust.

First up is Floyd Landis, (if you don't know the story look it up). What Floyd did is open up his case to the world.

Adam, the Reuters reporter in Second Life. They are reporting in a virtual realm, they are looking for stories and facts. Can this be done?

LonelyGirl15, she is the direct opposite of the Reuters reporter. She went into a real/trustworthy space and created something fake. She was quickly outed, but it exposed a new dimension.

Mary Engle with the FTC was the last of the panelists. What does the FTC have to do with WOM? Well they regulate advertising so it obviously impacts the audience. What the law requires is that all advertising be honest and not be misleading. Organizations can't make false claims in advertising. They look at things from the standpoint of a reasonable consumer. However many times an ad can be interpreted in a number of ways by different consumers. If one of those interpretations is misleading then the ad

Recently they had a complaint about a WOM campaign. The gist of the complaint dealt with consumers being paid to endorse a product and then not disclosing that relationship. There must be a disclosure. The guidelines for this type of activity were already covered under testimonials,

The use of children and teens in WOM. The concern was that the use of children was unethical. While the FTC is concerned with this, they can only look at things from a legal aspect and not from an ethical standpoint. The ethical question is something that WOMMA can/should handle. Obviously there should be disclosure on behalf of the teen/child if payment is being made. One issue that has legal precedent is the targeting/approaching of children under 13 online.

To sum things up, Mary said, "If you are paying consumers to buzz about your product you must disclose that."

At the end a question was raised, did LonleyGirl15 take away some of the trust of the medium which is something that impacts everybody? Gary said yes.