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.

Speaking at Blissdom

I’ll be speaking at Blissdom, in Nashville, Tennessee on February 5, 2010!

The panel is called “You Should Know Better: A Blogger’s Guide to Legal, Accounting and FTC Guidelines.” And I will be appearing with the very talented Susan Getgood, one of the founders of the Blog With Integrity project.

I can hardly wait!