From the BlawgIt blog of Iowa patent attorney Brent Trout comes this helpful post on the legal pitfalls of social networking. Many entrepreneurial bloggers use their blogs as an opportunity for product reviews. What’s not always known is that bloggers occasionally get paid for those product reviews. It make a difference, doesn’t it–knowing whether a review comes from someone completely objective or a paid promoter? If getting paid for your reviews were part of your business model, don’t you think that would color the kind of review you gave?
As Trout points out, the Federal Trade Commission has made it clear that if a paid endorsement “might materially affect the weight or credibility of the endorsement,” such endorsement must be fully disclosed. Trout goes on to talk about what constitutes “disclosure” and how you can be guided accordingly.
This entry was posted on Thursday, May 8th, 2008 at 8:29 am and is filed under Social Media. 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.Leave a Reply
