The practice of “Astroturfing” or producing a fake grassroots campaign is coming under scrutiny. This applies to fake blogs or fake product reviews in an effort to sway public and consumer opinion. In business blog marketing we need to be aware of the legal landscape.

Paid posts for writing product reviews have become common in the blogging community. Companies hire people to either write blog reviews that are favorable or to place favorable comments on other blogs.

Most companies take an ethical approach and compensate bloggers for both good and bad reviews.

Jeremy Toeman states “As an example, at Sling Media I implemented a strict policy that no employee was to add comments about the Slingbox on any blog or review site (such as CNET or Amazon) without disclosing their employment status.”

We are now seeing laws and regulations being created and enforced to protect consumers.

The Times of London has reported that the European Union is expected to overhaul its consumer laws by early 2008. They will make it “a crime to falsely represent oneself as a consumer on blogs or other online forums.”

The US Federal Trade Commission (section 5 of the FTC act) deals with failure to disclose that a marketer is paying a sponsored consumer to make claims to other consumers about the marketer’s product.

What is important is that when a connection exists between the endorser and the seller of a product that significantly affects the endorsement, such connection must be fully disclosed.

What does this mean?

1. Bloggers should never claim to be an objective and unbiased source if they are not.
2. Bloggers should disclose posts that are paid reviews.

This article was not written by a lawyer and it does not intend to constitute legal advice.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 11th, 2007 at 4:24 am and is filed under Blog Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.