FTC and Blogging
The buzz about the United States government cracking down on unscrupulous “hawkers” of products and services gets my vote regarding protecting the public from getting duped in “get rich quick” schemes or just plain misrepresentation of products and services.
If any blogger, whether business blogging or blogging for personal use is on the “up and up,” there is no reason to worry. It seems that all bloggers have an anxiety attack on this law, to take effect on December 1, 2009.
If any blogger is doing their job to legitimately promote their own product and service, there should be no problem. If any legitimate blogger is promoting another company’s product or service as an affiliate, there just needs to be public disclosure about if they are getting paid or not to promote said product and service. The second important item that is covered in the new FTC ruling is in the claims from people who are added as a testimonial of a said product or service. The results of what the product or service has done for the customer has to be fully disclosed in real outcomes. There can be no outlandish claims about “overly” praising a product or service as to lead a potential customer to be mislead.
I think that the people who are running questionable businesses will be the only ones fearing this new FTC ruling.
What is most intriguing about this ruling is, given that there are approximately over 200 million blogs in the world today, how is the United States goverment going to enforce this law? Out of the 200 million blogs that exist, Technorati “guestimates” the number of US blogs at 114 million.
To all new businesses that start a blog, especially a localy business blog, there is no need to really worry about getting the fines, or getting shut down, as long as you are operating legitimately, you have no need to worry.
Comments
I agree. I don’t think most bloggers will really be impacted by this new ruling. I do hope that more disclosure will occur which will inform consumers that they might not be getting a truly “unbiased” review of a product/service.
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