Blissdom Conference with FTC Update

I was on a great panel yesterday with Susan Getgood from Blog With Integrity and Kristen Berman from Intuit, here at the Blissdom 2010 Conference.

One of the difficult questions that came up is around the FTC Advertising Guides. As many of you know, Blog With Integrity did a Webinar in November with Mary Engle of the FTC.

In that session, Ms. Engle indicated that bloggers need to put disclosures of any material relationships in the top of a blog post, NOT at the bottom.

Confusingly, one of her colleagues, Richard Cleland, did a different webinar in which he said that that it was fine to put disclosures at the bottom of a post.

Happily, here in the Blissdom Conference audience, we had a 3rd member of the FTC Advertising Practices team, Stacey Ferguson. Stacey helpfully clarified — and promised she’d try to make sure that everyone on the team communicates the same message — the following:

The FTC prefers disclosures to be at the top of the post, but that is NOT a requirement of the Guides.

Let me say that again:

You do not HAVE to put disclosures at the top of the post.

Disclosures still need to be within each applicable post. Blanket disclosures are not good enough. BUT. There is more flexibility in where and how that looks than had been previously communicated.

Remember, the standard is that the disclosure must be “clear and conspicuous.” If you’ve been paid or received goods or services for free, you need to disclose that in a clear and conspicuous way. Forunately, exactly what that looks like has some room for interpretation within your post.

FTC Guides Article in Wisconsin Lawyer

Check out my article in the December 2009 issue of Wisconsin Lawyer: Endorsements, Testimonials, and Bloggers: The New FTC Guides.

This article spends a little more time on advertising endorsement issues in general, not just with regard to bloggers.

Liza Speaking at Atlanta RIMS Educational Conference

I’m very excited to go down to Atlanta on February 18, 2010, to speak at the Atlanta RIMS Educational Conference.

In case RIMS is a new element for your acronym soup, it isn’t a car accessory company. RIMS is the Risk and Insurance Management Society, the professional organization for corporate risk management professionals.

I don’t have a panel title yet, but we will be talking about how companies can mitigate the risks associated with social media participation. I expect that I’ll be talking a great deal about the FTC Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising that go into effect December 1, 2009.

Book Bloggers, Book Marketing, and the FTC Guides

Yesterday I had the great opportunity to speak with Penny Sansevieri and Paula Kampf of The Publishing Insider program on BlogTalkRadio.

We talked about how the new FTC Guides about product endorsements apply to book bloggers, authors, book publishers, and book marketing people.

It was a great discussion — you can listen to it on-demand. Penny & Paula are lively, intelligent hosts, and I had a great time talking with them.

They also pointed me to several interviews and public appearances that FTC officials have done with the book industry and book media. At first glance, it looks like the various FTC officials are not all on the same page about fundamental questions like, to whom do the Guides apply? When is a disclosure required? Over the next couple of days, I’ll gather the various articles and posts, and provide a summary with my opinion about the bottom line(s) here.