While a lot of attention surrounding the new guidelines being issued by the FTC is regarding bloggers there is also another who section of advertisers that is going to get hit hard by these new guidelines. Ignoring the fact for now that newspapers are being given a clear path to maintain their current status quo of self-regulation guerilla marketers are going to have a very hard time doing business under these guidelines.

For those not familiar with the term guerilla marketing it is a type of marketing where for example sake you are sitting at the bar having a nice cold beer and some-one you don’t know sits down beside you and you both start talking about brands of beer and why you like certain ones. This person beside you starts really talking up the brand of beer, one you’ve probably never tried because it’s new, their are drinking and then offers to buy you one, or two.

That is what is commonly referred to as guerilla marketing.

To the FTC this type of advertising would require full disclosure

A young man signs up to be part of a “street team” program in which points
are awarded each time a team member talks to his or her friends about a particular
advertiser’s products. Team members can then exchange their points for prizes, such as
concert tickets or electronics. These incentives would materially affect the weight or
credibility of the team member’s endorsements. They should be clearly and
conspicuously disclosed, and the advertiser should take steps to ensure that these
disclosures are being provided.

(page 81)

As I said earlier the only medium not covered by any of these new guidelines is the traditional print media – anyone else … well you’re fair game.

FTC guidelines take aim at guerilla marketing as well is a post from: The Inquisitr

As of today the FTC has made it perfectly clear – bloggers are a bunch of scum who will do everything possible to suck in their readers to purchase products that they have been prompted to say are the best thing since sliced bread because the company who gave them the product expects them to. We as bloggers apparently have no mind of our owns and can easily be swayed by some humping dog USB or a laptop that we wouldn’t normally be able to spend a thousand or two to buy.

It doesn’t matter if we write something cool about Field Notes, the latest cookie-cutter game, of a cutting edge smartphone. It only matters that we wrote something about that product. It doesn’t matter that we called out a product for being the piece of crap that it is or if it is actually something that helps us in our daily computing life. We’re just stupid and need to be told that our readers are stupid as well and that without the FTC stepping in and letting our readers know that bloggers are evil because we didn’t let them know we might have gotten something for free.

Of course our journalistic betters (at least in the eyes of the FTC) don’t have to follow the same <cough> guidelines </cough> that are being forced up bloggers. When was the last time that you heard of a movie review letting their readers know that they had been given tickets to the hottest shows or that unlike the rest of the rubes don’t wait in all those same line-ups. Not to mention that until recently people like Pogue, Mossberg or any other number of tech reviews for newspapers declared the fact that they got freebies to reviews. I was only since bloggers started suggesting that if this was the way it was to be or them then it should be the same for everyone,

In a comment to a post by Jeff Jarvis (well worth the read) Matt Cutts of Google’s Spam team had the audacity to agree with the move by the FTC. His reasoning – all those evil bloggers polluting the Google stream:

As a Google engineer who has seen the damage done by fake blogs, sock puppets, and endless scams on the internet, I’m happy to take the opposite position: I think the FTC guidelines will make the web more useful and more trustworthy for consumers. Consumers don’t want to be shilled and they don’t want payola; they want a web that they can trust. The FTC guidelines just say that material connections should be disclosed. From having dealt with these issues over several years, I believe that will be a good thing for the web.

Please. This is a fine example of FUD and shifting the responsibility of trying to keep the garbage out of the web. Nothing, absolutely nothing in the FTC pointed attack against bloggers will have any effect against sploggers and the like. You want to clean up that mess then Google should be looking a lot closer to home especially consider that the majority of all that blog spam can be traced back to Blogger.com – which by the way is owned by Google.

Sorry Matt but that is just a bullshit argument pure and simple. Threatening bloggers, and their advertisers with a $11,000 fine isn’t going to do a single thing to stop that kind of crap polluting the blogosphere.

As long as the FTC is willing to let the newspaper industry to self-regulate itself then that should also be good enough for bloggers since in many cases I would suggest that career bloggers have as much ethics or even more more than a lot of journalist who are probably laughing their ass off right now about how those asshole bloggers have finally gotten their comeuppance.

Then we have real jerk-offs like Jake Ellis, a spokesman for the Consumer Federation of America, who don’t think that the FTC has gone far enough. It is his opinion that bloggers would be gone after and have as much pressure applied on them as possible because of course we all know that our opinion is something that our long time readers aren’t smart enough to see as the scam that it is.

The really sad part of this is the fact that there are some big successful blogs who think this move is just peachy because unlike them the rest of the blogosphere is nothing but unscrupulous bloggers that do nothing but deceive their readers in order to get all those goodies.

Here’s some questions though that still remain to be answered and if they aren’t then this whole thing is nothing more than a power grab and a way to try and shut up one of the largest growing forms of journalism this world has seen

1. Will these same ‘guidelines’ be applied against “traditional media” and if not – why not?

2. What exact form do these disclosure need to take? Per post? Per page? Per comment?

3. Is this retroactive? Does this mean that sites like Gizmodo, TechCrunch, Mashable, – well every single blog past and present will have to go through all their archives and add a disclaimer. Because we all know that posts that are even months or years old can resurface.

4.Will book publisher make signing a discloser form a part of bloggers doing book reviews and is it really worth the effort at that point?

5. Does the country of origin of the writer matter as to whether a disclosure is included?

6. Does it matter the country of origin of where the blog served from come into play?

7 Does the country of origin of the product, service or book come into play at all?

Not only does something like this draconian move by the FTC insinuate that all bloggers are stupid and evil with no sense of ethics but it also makes out readers out to be just as stupid or not able to make an intelligent decision that they are being screwed with.

In the end these laws will do nothing to change the landscape because for as long as there has been people there has been stupid people who will be gullible enough to fall for anything.

Here is a round-up of some of the conversation going on about this travesty

FTC Publishes Final Guides Governing Endorsements, Testimonials

FTC to Bloggers: Disclose Freebies or Face $11,000 Fine – ReadWriteWeb

FTC Values Sponsored Conversations at $11,000 Apiece. – TechCrunch

FTC Launches New Guidelines For Blogs – StarterTech

FTC Media Roundup: The Good, the Bad and the Indifferent – SiliconANGLE

FTC says bloggers must disclose payments and freebies when reviewing products or risk being fined $16,000 – Orlando Sentinel

Bloggers Must Disclose Payments for Reviews – New York Times

FTC to Fine Bloggers up to $11,000 for Not Disclosing Payments – Mashable

FTC regulates our speech – Jeff Jarvis

[Special] CobWEBs Daily Podcast: Anyone thinking the FTC blogger rules are a good thing are fuckwads – Shooting at Bubbles

The FTC brings out the nut crackers and centers out bloggers. is a post from: The Inquisitr

It appears that the Washington Post has finally had enough of their staff’s free-wheeling Twitter postings. While we might all look at the thousands of Twitter messages that fly around the world every minute as being pretty harmless WaPo senior editor Milton Coleman thinks otherwise – specifically when it comes to the newspaper’s staff.

Coleman has been working on the news organization’s social media guidelines since May but as a result of the reaction to a couple of Twitter messages by managing editor Raju Narisetti (who has since removed his Twitter account) the guidelines were put into force a little sooner than originally planned. The reasoning behind the stringent guidelines all boils down to – a matter of perception.

As Andrew Alexander writes on the Washington Post Ombudsman Blog where the new guidelines were announced

In today’s hyper-sensitive political environment, Narisetti’s tweets could be seen as one of The Post’s top editors taking sides on the question of whether a health-care reform plan must be budget neutral. On Byrd, his comments could be construed as favoring term limits or mandatory retirement for aging lawmakers. Many readers already view The Post with suspicion and believe that the personal views of its reporters and editors influence the coverage. The tweets could provide ammunition.

In the staff note that accompanied the release today of the guidelines Post Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli mentions this perception problem

“A few instances recently have been brought to my attention of items posted online that are incompatible with our standards,” he wrote. “As a result, we decided to accelerate the completion of these guidelines.”

He described them as “the first of what we anticipate will be several sets of standards and principles governing newsroom practices.”

The actual guidelines as quoted by Alexander in his post contain this about the perception problem

“When using these networks, nothing we do must call into question the impartiality of our news judgment. We never abandon the guidelines that govern the separation of news from opinion, the importance of fact and objectivity, the appropriate use of language and tone, and other hallmarks of our brand of journalism.”

Another section reads: “What you do on social networks should be presumed to be publicly available to anyone, even if you have created a private account. It is possible to use privacy controls online to limit access to sensitive information. But such controls are only a deterrent, not an absolute insulator. Reality is simple: If you don’t want something to be found online, don’t put it there.”

It continues: “Post journalists must refrain from writing, tweeting or posting anything – including photographs or video – that could be perceived as reflecting political racial, sexist, religious or other bias or favoritism that could be used to tarnish our journalistic credibility.”

Washington Post puts the hammer down of staff tweets is a post from: The Inquisitr

I really don’t envy journalists in today’s tumultuous world of changing media boundaries. One minute they are expected to behave as journalists have have for decades and the next they are have to navigate the new world of Twitter and Facebook – often without any “established” guidelines.

This has resulted in many news organizations to finally face facts – social media isn’t going anywhere so we had better figure out how to finally use in a way that is on one hand ready for the future but still tries to maintain journalistic ethics. Sure it is one thing to be willing to jump in with both feet and harness the power of social media and all it can add to journalism, the trick is how to do it without impugning the integrity of the organization, the reporters, photographers and editors.

To do this news organizations like the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Associated Press, Roanoke Times along with many others have been trying to hammer out a code of ethics guidelines that they can live with when it comes to dealing with social media.

Mary Hartney, director of audience engagement at the Baltimore Sun, says reporters, editors, managers and others will help shape the new guidelines. "The technology is changing, so I hope the ethics policy is a living document," says Hartney, who estimates about half the Sun’s newsroom actively uses social networks. "All of this stuff is changing very rapidly. So, anything you write down in an ethics policy or as a best practice is liable to change next week."

On social networks, you should identify yourself as a journalist, tell recipients if you’re using social networks in a professional capacity and remain mindful that people will regard you as a representative of your newsroom, says Kelly McBride, ethics group leader at the Poynter Institute.

"For journalists, transparency is one of the most important values," she says. "That doesn’t mean you don’t act as an individual, but there should be a caution gate if there’s anything that might embarrass your newsroom."

Source: American Journalism Review :: The Limits of Control

Amid their decline newspapers still trying to figure out social media is a post from: The Inquisitr