About a year ago, the major buzz on the Internet was all about the FTC and their new rules; rules directed at social media and online marketing, that basically said if you are compensated in any way for reviewing or endorsing a product, you must fully disclose this. \u00a0It made a lot of people made. \u00a0It made others cry foul. \u00a0And it made many think that there’s no way the FTC can monitor billions of pages on the Internet. \u00a0Well, it turns out the FTC is actively cracking down on the worst offenders.<\/p>\n
At least a little bit. \u00a0So far they’ve launched a grand total of two public investigations. \u00a0One was for video game developers who had hired people to write up positive reviews for video games. \u00a0The case was settled with no fines and no admission of guilt. \u00a0But it goes to show they are watching…after all, video game reviews aren’t exactly high crimes. \u00a0They also investigated Ann Taylor stores after it was learned bloggers were given free gifts when previewing their summer collection…and didn’t disclose that they received free gifts in their reviews. \u00a0Again, not exactly high crimes, but it caught the attention of the FTC anyway.<\/p>\n
The lesson for all bloggers, marketers and social media folks is that no matter who you are, you have to play by the rules. \u00a0If you don’t, you just might be rolling the dice of whether or not the FTC will come calling. \u00a0For a full review on what the FTC is doing, you can read the Chicago Tribune’s piece on it by clicking here<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" About a year ago, the major buzz on the Internet was all about the FTC and their new rules; rules directed at social media and online marketing, that basically said if you are compensated in any way for reviewing or endorsing a product, you must fully disclose this. \u00a0It made a lot of people made. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[19],"tags":[700,701],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1788"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1788"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1788\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1795,"href":"https:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1788\/revisions\/1795"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1788"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1788"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webvideouniversity.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1788"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}