Just a gentle reminder to everyone, especially if you do product reviews on your blogs that today, FTC’s new regulation covering blogger disclosure takes into effect. If you haven’t done so yet, it’s either you’re playing hardball or you’re not a celebrity blogger or endorser popular enough for the FTC notice your practice and actually goes after you.
In case you forgot (I personally did, except that FTC rulings does not apply to us non-US based bloggers I guess), the revised FTC guide states that
“…the post of a blogger who receives cash or in-kind payment to review a product is considered an endorsement. Thus, bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service.”
Material connection means that the blogger or endorser receives any form of payments for endorsing/reviewing any products. I’m just not sure whether this covers tech bloggers who receive demo units of products that they review and then returns the products afterwards. Are their reviews bias or unbias based on FTC’s rulings?
Anyway, have you acted upon this new FTC guidelines? What have you done to adhere to this new clause in the FTC guidelines? Have you incorporated individual disclosure for every product reviews you make or you just did a general statement.
The thing is how can the FTC prove that you did not receive any payment in cash or in kind for a product that you are reviewing if you can just place a disclaimer saying that you did not?
Author: Arnold Zafra
Arnold Zafra is a freelance blogger/writer from Manila. He believes that 2010 will be the year of the ebook readers so he created a new blog dedicated to the upcoming Asus Eee Reader. You can follow him on Twitter.
