Its their own fault if it doesnt even dawn on them, let this be a long overdue wakeup call.
The FTC look at all this stuff on a case-by-case basis anyway, they arent going to attempt to police this stuff down to the last blog or twitter, indeed a large point of updating the guidelines is to get most people to self-police because they wont have the excuse that they never even considered this stuff or that the guidelines didnt mention them. And for those who persistently mislead or just ignore the issue, well occasionally the book will get thrown at them, further raising awareness for everyone else. Im sure that a few genuinely murky areas may emerge where people may be justified in not knowing how to handle things, or where there seems to bean injustice, but overall after reading the guidelines I think quite a lot of sensible thinking has gone into them and for the majority of cases its quite straightforward. If I have understood the guidelines properly, one area that may spell trouble for certain corners of the blogosphere is that companies can be held to account if bloggers that they pay or give freebies to, make misleading claims about the products. Companies are advised to shield themselves from this stuff by taking some steps to limit this where possible, such as monitoring the bloggers they seduce, and not giving any more freebies to bloggers who make spurious claims about their products. The celebrity stuff brought a grin to my face as celebs can no longer rely on a 'I was just reading a script/sticking to my contract' defense if they are bullshitting about a product in certain specific ways. I consider all of this as fairly inevitable considering the changed nature of the distribution of these messages. Endorsers messages are no longer published only by the company who make the products, do the endorsers themselves are deemed responsible and will sometimes be held to account. Cheers Steve Elbows --- In [email protected], David King <davidleek...@...> wrote: > I know a lot of bloggers that mix business and pleasure, > professional interests and family, and well - they're still in that murky > middle area where policies like the FTC is going after ... wouldn't even > dawn on them. > > That, plus the fact that there are like a gazillion blogs out there, makes > this a hard thing to enforce, I think :-) >
