As of December 1, 2009, new FTC guidelines went into effect requiring bloggers to disclose any time they are compensated for endorsing or reviewing products or services. Bloggers should now be disclosing any time they receive payment, free products or services, or perks in return for a post on their blogs. Also any relationship with a company or organization that can be viewed as creating a conflict of interest should be disclosed. It is also a good idea to add disclosures to any past posts that still receive a decent amount of traffic.
The main focus for the blogger should be transparency. Tom Chernaik, one of the developers of http://CMP.ly (Comply), has had several discussions directly with the FTC. In a phone conversation yesterday, Tom told me that “what the FTC has said is that they’re not looking to go after bloggers. What they want is for people to comply and be transparent and to be open about what they’re doing.” He stated that most of the burden will fall on advertisers. They will be responsible for “lead[ing] the discussion about disclosure…and having a monitoring plan in place to monitor those disclosures as they occur.”
This does not mean that bloggers are without responsibility. Although the FTC may focus mainly on advertisers, bloggers are still required to include disclosures on their blogs and can be fined if they don’t include them. Because many bloggers are confused about what they will be required to include on their blogs, CMP.ly is making it easy for bloggers to include disclosures. By creating a free account at CMP.ly you will have access to six standard disclosures and a custom disclosure that can be pasted into your post. If you feel like taking a more relaxed approach to the whole disclosure issue, humorous illustrated disclosures can be found at Louis Gray’s blog. Whatever path you take, just be transparent and you should be OK.
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