On October 5, 2009, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) published FTC Publishes Final Guides Governing Endorsements, Testimonials – Changes Affect Testimonial Advertisements, Bloggers, Celebrity Endorsements. Of course, this issue is debatable on the fact that at this moment it has never been officially said that the Internet was medium, as perceived by WebProNews covers in their article Potential FTC Fines Raise Big Blogging Questions.
This issue does crack down on people who blog for pay, or pay to post/ pay to review. And it is right to do so as blogging is steadily being recognized as a medium as news stations are even turning to interviewing prominent bloggers for their experience on certain topics. This is not a single case deal as these are widely seen all over, even in my area – the St. Louis metro east (Southern Illinois.) Bloggers are influencing people with their posts. Some choose to endorse products and that can run into problems if a company has a product that is not up to par as what the blogger said.
With this policy, the company must provide adequate instructions to bloggers to post disclosures making their readers aware that they will write product reviews for monetary gain. This includes places like Pay Per Post and Social Spark, who run between the companies to get bloggers to write about them. This will deter companies with less than honest reputation to avoid seeking bloggers to endorse without a disclosure. By the way, Pay Per Post and Social Spark, who are properties of Izea require site wide disclosures and/or individual post disclosures. You can get a site wide disclosure with DisclosurePolicy.org for free, or create your own. In doing so will establish a more honest relationship with your readers.
As for individuals, it is important to put a notation of some type that the post is either a paid review, endorsement, or something similar. It would be recommended to do this with past posts even if the policy is not to go into effect until December 1, 2009. Violation of this policy could cost a blogger $11,000. Of course, this extends to even advertising in your social networking streams like Twitter and Facebook, but I decided to focus on the blogging aspect in this article.
What do you think of FTC’s policy change? Do you do paid to post? Do you have a disclosure policy for your blog?
It will be interesting on how this is gonna turn out in a couple months..
I think so too. There are a lot of bloggers with mixed reactions. As Charity said after your comment, some clarification may be needed. However, I think even places like Blogverse will have to shape up and make sure all of their posts are disclosures. Some of the opps I have received are not, and I refuse to post about such opportunities because it is not honest and makes me think the company behind it is shady.
I think a big part of the problem is going to be the need for precise clarification on what is and is not considered to be paid blogging and paid to post/review. Some paid blogging companies are claiming they are exempt because they do not actually pay for “posts”, they pay you for a “contextual link” in an otherwise normal post – so they state that people posting for them are not actually doing paid blogging.
I would like to see the FTC give clear expectations and guidelines as to what comprises paid to post/review and if it includes simple contextual links as well as posts speaking of a particular site/product/service. Another thing I think should/could be clarified is whether site-wide disclosure is sufficient or if it should be on a post-by-post basis.
I believe this is a good thing as frankly, if I give an opinion about a product I do not want someone else coming back and stating they purchased that product because of my review and then attempting to take action against me because of it.
However all of my paid tweets are disclosed as they have “ad:” in front of them so that people know they are ads. But will shall have to see how everything pans out.
I believe your disclosure should cover it. For example, if I were to blog about a website without endorsing it… like I usually do when introducing nifty resources for webmasters, I do not have to put ‘not an endorsement’. What I do have to do when paid to blog is to put somewhere in my post whether by tag, a line of text, a graphic (like in Social Spark), that it is a sponsored or paid post.
If people were to make such accusations, I am sure they would end up looking like asses in the end because you clearly put in your disclosure that paid articles WILL be disclosed as such.