FTC Blogger Guidelines – A Look at Enforcement
It is a task often relegated to the office interns: posting promotional content to outside social media sites.
Despite the fact that this practice is officially frowned upon in the Federal Trade Commission’s 2009 endorsement guidelines, companies will often engage paid individuals – either employees on the payroll or outside bloggers who receive compensation in the form of a free sample – to post positive reviews online, including to places like Twitter, personal blogs, or online public forums without identifying the connection between the commenter and the product being commented on.
The FTC’s endorsement guidelines seek (among other things) to ensure that unbiased positive reviews online can be considered credible, while also ensuring that positive reviews that are partially the result of some sort of compensation be acknowledged as such.
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