Bloggers: Disclose Your Relationships Or Else
I wrote this piece yesterday for Multichannel Merchant about updated Federal Trade Commission guidelines that will force bloggers who receive swag or cash in exchange of a blog post to disclose their relationship with product or service.
And after I heard Emilio Amodei, founder of BlogVertise, discuss how his company can get your product blogged about by hundreds of bloggers, I had a red flag go up.
I can see someone with a product or a service wanting to get exposed by bloggers back in 2005 or before. But now we’re in an era of product ratings and recommendations. And consumers are savvy enough to go to, say, Amazon.com and see what people who have used a certain product has to say about it, rather than trusting Joe Blogger who may just say nice things for the payout.
It’s all a matter of trust, and I think Joe Consumer is going to trust sites with ratings and recommendations before a blogger.
What do you think? Is the blogosphere a reputable enough place yet? Or for that matter, are readers smart enough to see a product pitch as a product pitch?
