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Weekend Roundup #56

Jaypee Habaradas — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 07:01:45 +0000

Howdy folks? How’s everyone doing? Hope everyone’s having a good weekend so far. I’m doing good right now but my thoughts and prayers are with my fellow countrymen in the Philippines who have been hit by calamities the past few weeks. First was typhoon Ketsana (Ondoy) that caused the worst floods in years, then the 6.7 earthquake and just the other day, typhoon Parma (Pepeng) that hit Baguio, La Union, Benguet and other nearby areas. I heard that around 200 people died from the landslides caused by typhoon Pepeng. I also found out that my father and some 300 delegates who attended his seminar are stranded in Baguio. My friend Gem who lives in Baguio, is also one of the residents affected by this recent calamity. Let’s all pray for them and if we can, send some help. I hope that they and the residents of those areas receive the necessary help from the government and be able to recover ASAP.

On a positive note, I have some good news for the loyal readers/visitors of JaypeeOnline. But I won’t be talking about it here. I’ll be doing a separate post about it, so just watch out for it. Anyways, hope you folks enjoy this week’s edition of the Weekend Roundup.

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If you have any questions, comments, suggestions or want your article or find an interesting story that you want to be featured in the next Weekend Roundup, feel free to leave a comment or send me a message via the contact page.

Thank you for your time and hope you guys are having a great week!

FTC Implement Tougher Guidelines for Blog Endorsements/Disclosure

Jaypee Habaradas — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 04:26:04 +0000

One of the hottest topics/stories in the blogosphere yesterday was about the new guidelines implemented by the FTC or Federal Trade Commission regarding blogger and celebrity endorsements, testimonials and disclosures. The FTC Guides were last updated back in 1980 and this is the first time the Guides were amended in 29 years.

Here’s an excerpt from the updated FTC Final Guides Governing Endorsements, Testimonials:

Under the revised Guides, advertisements that feature a consumer and convey his or her experience with a product or service as typical when that is not the case will be required to clearly disclose the results that consumers can generally expect. In contrast to the 1980 version of the Guides – which allowed advertisers to describe unusual results in a testimonial as long as they included a disclaimer such as “results not typical” – the revised Guides no longer contain this safe harbor.
The revised Guides also add new examples to illustrate the long standing principle that “material connections” (sometimes payments or free products) between advertisers and endorsers – connections that consumers would not expect – must be disclosed. These examples address what constitutes an endorsement when the message is conveyed by bloggers or other “word-of-mouth” marketers. The revised Guides specify that while decisions will be reached on a case-by-case basis, 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. Likewise, if a company refers in an advertisement to the findings of a research organization that conducted research sponsored by the company, the advertisement must disclose the connection between the advertiser and the research organization. And a paid endorsement – like any other advertisement – is deceptive if it makes false or misleading claims.
Celebrity endorsers also are addressed in the revised Guides. While the 1980 Guides did not explicitly state that endorsers as well as advertisers could be liable under the FTC Act for statements they make in an endorsement, the revised Guides reflect Commission case law and clearly state that both advertisers and endorsers may be liable for false or unsubstantiated claims made in an endorsement – or for failure to disclose material connections between the advertiser and endorsers. The revised Guides also make it clear that celebrities have a duty to disclose their relationships with advertisers when making endorsements outside the context of traditional ads, such as on talk shows or in social media.

Read full article here.

So what it basically says is that bloggers or celebrities who do endorsements must properly or fully disclose any payments (cash or in kind) they’ve received from companies or entities in exchange for those endorsements/reviews. Failure to do so could cost the guilty party a penalty of $11,000 per violation. It also means that aside from pay-per-post reviews, any reviews, endorsements or testimonials that involve freebies, are now required to be disclosed. The only thing that’s unclear with these new set of guidelines is where should the blogger post or display the disclosure? Should it be in each individual post or in a disclosure page? Also, should the blogger disclose what compensation they received?

I haven’t done paid reviews in a long time but as a blogger whose done paid reviews/endorsements in the past, I don’t mind having this new guidelines. I believe in creating and developing a trustworthy and honest relationship with my blog readers and visitors. I make sure that I point out that a certain post is a paid review and I also have a Disclosure Policy here on my blog. In the event that I receive compensation for reviews and endorsements, I make it a point that I try out the product/service first and that I publish my honest and personal opinion about the product.

I’m not an expert on legal issues but from what I understand, this new guidelines would only affect bloggers in the US, right? The FTC will surely have a hard time policing the millions of blogs in the Internet. Maybe they’ll start with the A-list bloggers and work their way down to other bloggers. Btw, from what I’ve read in the various articles and from the Guides itself, this new set of guidelines also cover Twitter, Facebook (including Facebook Fan Pages) and other forms of social media.

How about you guys? What do you think about the FTC’s new guidelines regarding blogger and celebrity endorsements, reviews, testimonials and disclosures? For those of you who do paid reviews and receive compensation for product reviews and endorsements, do you like this new guidelines set by the FTC? For the consumers, what type of disclosure do you expect from bloggers who endorse products and services? Do you want it on individual posts or just a one page blog disclosure policy? Please share your thoughts.

Weekend Roundup #55

Jaypee Habaradas — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 01:47:22 +0000

Hello everyone! Pardon the very late release of this week’s edition of the Weekend Roundup. If you’ve been visiting/following the blog the past few days, you know that I was migrating my blog to a new webhost. I did that last weekend but encountered some mod/rewrite rule issues so I decided to go back to my previous hosting provider. So in a span of 3 days I migrated my blog to different webhosts, twice. Because of that, I wasn’t able to publish this edition of the Weekend Roundup on time. I had to wait until the DNS propagation was in full effect before posting any articles/updates so that everyone would be able to access them. Hope you guys like this week’s roundup.

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Thank you for your time and hope you guys are having a great week!