WOMMA: Better Late Than Never?

The Word of Mouth Marketing Association has published a letter it sent yesterday to Edelman PR honchos Richard Edelman and Rick Murray. It says that, a month after the fact, "WOMMA has determined that the company has breached the WOMMA Ethics Code — a code that Edelman helped write." So WOMMA has "put [Edelman's] membership under a 90-day review." and requested "corrective actions...some of which already appear to be in progress"

By issuing this sanction, a month after the fact, WOMMA is moving in pre-Internet time, which is light years slower than the real time speed of the Internet. And that inability to react in real time has rendered WOMMA impotent. This letter is nothing more than verbal Viagra for WOMMA's flacid ethics policy.

WOMMA is a trade association with a traditional structure that makes it lumber along like the giant committee it is. . But then, as a favorite client of mine used to say, "You can search every plaza and park in the planet and you will never find a monument to a committee.

What WOMMA's really missing is community and collaboration, the two foundations of effective word of mouth.

Guess they forgot about they had already " ... held discussions with top Edelman executives regarding this situation. The company has committed itself to a global training program to ensure that all of its employees and sub-contractors fully adhere to the WOMMA Ethics Code, and to establishing mechanisms to assure compliance." Dated 10/18/06
http://www.womma.org/pages/2006/10/womma_statement.htm

Does issuing this new mandate to Edelman mean a precedent is set .. if the pressures from the biz blog community are too strong WOMMA gets to gets to issue additional spanks?