FTC Still Unsure About Blogging Disclosure Guidelines

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Shevonne authors at ChicWriter.com and wrote this article on behalf of TopHost.Gr, a Greek web host that offers shared hosting.

Remember last year when the FTC caused a huge uproar in the blogosphere when it announced that it was going to start requiring bloggers to disclose all products and services received in exchange for a blog post?

It’s 2010 and the FTC is still unsure on how to handle this.  According to the FTC Northeast Regional Director Leonard Cohen, the FTC is still trying to define the disclosure guidelines for bloggers.  He sat down with the Wall Street Journal to provide an update on the issue that caused tons of bloggers to rant about the news. 

Cohen stated that bloggers “went a little crazy with visions of storm troopers taking down suburban houses and seizing the computers of mommy bloggers.”  However, the Wall Street Journal says that he indicated that the FTC does not plan to be that aggressive.

One point that Cohen made is that consumers usually don’t know when bloggers are being paid to plug a service or product. “Consumers hopefully are a little bit skeptical of what they see in advertising,” Mr. Gordon said. “But if consumers aren’t using that healthy skepticism in looking at these things, then that’s a concern to us.” If consumers knew this tidbit of information, then they would probably have a different reaction in what a blogger is saying.

Cohen might be correct, but how can he be sure? Has there been an unbiased study to prove this? Have consumers not found celebrities testimonies on various products or services on television, radio, and/or print credible? Isn’t this why companies pay celebrities to plug their stuff because they know this would entice consumers?  I am not saying that Cohen is wrong, but his opinion, and a few in the FTC, shouldn’t be stated with such certainty.  Additionally, FTC shouldn’t be acting as though consumers are naïve, and need their hands to be held.

FTC should never have announced that they were going to start these disclosure guidelines until they were 100% sure on how they were going to proceed with them.  Uncertainty causes people to panic because there are no concrete answers that they can grasp.  This was the mistake that they made, so they shouldn’t be too annoyed that the blogosphere had an upheaval about the vague blogging disclosure rules.

What do you think? Would the blogosphere have reacted differently if the FTC wouldn’t have made the announcement until they had concrete blogging disclosure guidelines?