Suggest dev kit to colleague, pay $11,000 to FTC

Do you write a blog or maintain a Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter account? Perhaps you’ve used your social-networking skills to recommend to your colleagues an engineering book, or maybe you’ve commented favorably on a development kit. But if you try either beginning December 1, you’d better beware. You could be running afoul of Federal Trade Commission guidelines governing endorsements and testimonials if you received a free copy of the book or if the development-kit manufacturer gave you a pen at a trade show.According to the FTC, “The revised Guides…add new examples to illustrate the long-standing principle that ‘material connections’ (sometimes payments or free products) between advertisers and endorsers-connections that consumers would not expect-must be disclosed. These examples address what constitutes an endorsement when the message is conveyed by bloggers or other ‘word-of-mouth’ marketers. The revised Guides specify that while decisions will be reached on a case-by-case basis, the post of a blogger who receives cash or in-kind payment to review a product is considered an endorsement. Thus, bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service.”

That’s going to be a tough order in a Twitter post. How about IHAMRV (I Have a Material Relationship with the Vendor) or, if that’s to long, IGSE (I Got Something for this Endorsement)-would that be enough to avoid the FTC’s $11,000 fine?

This is simply a ridiculous effort on the part of government bureaucrats with a 19th century mindset to appear relevant in the 21st century.

Jack Shafer has this to say in Slate: “The guidelines have to be read to be believed…. Allowing these guidelines to take effect would be like giving the government a no-knock warrant to investigate hundreds of thousands of blogs and hundreds of millions of Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter users….”

Fortunately, these guidelines won’t apply to me. As Shafer explains, “Because of a pesky thing called the First Amendment, the guidelines don’t apply to news organizations, which receive thousands of free books, CDs, and DVDs each day from media companies hoping for reviews.” (I admit it, I get free books, but not thousands of them.) Shafer continues, “But if the guidelines don’t apply to established media like the New York Review of Books, which also happens to publish reviews on the Web, why should they apply to Joe Blow’s blog? Regulating bloggers via the FTC while exempting establishment reporters looks like a back-door means of licensing journalists and policing speech.”

I agree. Whatever your day job, your part-time blogging should have as much protection as my, or Shafer’s, full-time editorial output. And the FTC’s guidelines are doing readers no favors. Shafer concludes, “I’d rather wade through steaming piles of unethical crap on the Web than give the FTC Javertian powers…. This is one of those cases in which the government’s solution is 10 times worse than the problem.”

And as Choire Sicha puts it in the New York Times, “Stealth marketing, direct advertisement, and product placement work only on the clueless, and our immersive, hippo-like wallowing in the marketplace serves only to make us resistant to these viral contagions. Because the more we are sold to-and, believe it, we are being pitched every minute-the more immune we are to it all.”

Full disclosure: the above text contains a link to a description of a development kit, whose vendor at ESC Boston gave me a press kit on a 512-MB flash drive.

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