I’m chagrined at how naïve that rationale sounds today. The idea that retailers can in any way control what their customers say about them—whether they invite them to have their say on the company’s website or not—is preposterous. And given the number of attendees who flocked to this week’s WOMMA summit, it seems that a lot of retailers (and the ad agencies that work for them) have wised up.

If you’re interested in reading more about this event, the WOMMA site has pretty complete posts about it in its blog. Rather than rewrite what has already been written, I’d like to just highlight a couple of thoughts for the Shop.org membership:

• Anil Dash (Movable Type Professional Network, Six Apart) and Ice.com’s Pinny Gniwisch gave the audience some tips on how to get your company’s blog going. One interesting suggestion: don’t put it in marketing! Rather, find someone who is passionate about what your company does and what your brand stands for. It could be the receptionist; it could be someone in customer service. Look for the true believer and you’ll find a good blogger.
•  Edelman’s Rick Murray (President, me2revolution) talked about the need for marketers to find a way to fund Word of Mouth Marketing in their companies. He said that marketing budgets are a zero sum game, so you’ll need to fund WOM marketing with the dollars that might have been going to something else.
• Joel Book, director of e-marketing at ExactTarget, stressed the need to integrate any WOM marketing tactics well within your overall multi-channel marketing strategy. You’ll need buy-in from across your organization and awareness among key stakeholders about what the WOM tactics are likely to accomplish.

For those of you who attended the event, feel free to add your comments and impressions. And please let me know if this is a topic you’d like Shop.org to pursue even more than we already are. We’re here to help you, so please help us by telling us what you need.

It’s clear that most retailers want to do the right thing when it comes to their customers. I have talked with many of you out there who have given examples of how store employees accept returns from the company’s online sales channel because the customer expects it. Even though the company’s infrastructure won’t support this type of transaction and the store staff has to make lots of phone calls and do other fancy footwork to deal with the return, they know that their customer sees just the one brand and they try to deliver on that seamless view.

The need to deliver on the multi-channel promise is clear; the way to re-organize a retailer’s staff and infrastructure to support the promise is not. Many of you reading this blog live with this challenge every day. In fact, if there were one right way to structure a multi-channel retail organization, and every retailer did it, many of your job-related challenges would diminish along with your daily stress level.

One clear indication of how difficult it is to organize effectively comes down to where the e-commerce team lives within the organization. Retailers put this group in Sales, in Marketing, in Merchandising, or even in IT! What other department in retail as we know it today has this kind of identity problem?

So how does a multi-channel retailer make it possible to always do the right thing by the customer and set up its organization so that doing the right thing is always the easiest thing to do? How do retailers get past the legacy systems and siloed mindsets of its divisions to ensure that everyone has a clear incentive for playing nice and realizing the potential of multi-channel retailing?

I don’t have the answers to these questions, but through this blog I hope I can start to identify how we in the e-commerce part of retail can help to shape the multi-channel retail landscape for the future. I will invite guest bloggers from the retail, analyst, and service-provider communities to give their perspectives, and I invite all of you to comment and share your experiences and your opinions, too.

We know the challenges and live with the awkwardness of being a hard-to-define part of a retail organization. But we can also help to influence change, so let’s get started!