Dallas Internet Marketing | Dallas SEO » blog

New FTC Guidelines Affect Bloggers & Social Media Marketing

admin — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 10:21:46 +0000

Under new FTC guidelines released this week, bloggers and other “word of mouth” marketers who make an endorsement must disclose if there are material connections with the seller of the product or service. A material connection can include payments or free products received by the endorsers.

According to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) press release (5 Oct 2009):

“The post of a blogger who receives cash or in-kind payment to review a product is considered an endorsement. Thus, bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service. Likewise, if a company refers in an advertisement to the findings of a research organization that conducted research sponsored by the company, the advertisement must disclose the connection between the advertiser and the research organization. And a paid endorsement – like any other advertisement – is deceptive if it makes false or misleading claims.”

Given the core of social media is transparency and honest discussion, most bloggers and word of mouth marketers agree with this policy. We have a published disclosure policy on this blog and have encouraged other bloggers and social media marketers to do the same in the past. However, for social media marketing, the method for disclosure is not as straight forward. We occasionally send tweets about our (Seven Aspens’) clients and/or their products. How do you disclose in a 140 character Twitter message?

With potential hefty fines looming for violators, this is a good time to review your policies, ensure compliance and learn the best practices. To assist in the education process, the Word of Mouth Marketers Association (WOMMA) is hosting a free webinar Thursday, October 8, to help explain what the new FTC regulations mean for marketers, advertisers and bloggers. Additionally, the Social Media Business Council provides a great Disclosure Best Practices Toolkit.

New Study Shows Marketers are Moving to Social Media

admin — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 14:38:28 +0000

A new study shows that marketers are slowly making the transition to social media marketing with 63% stating they will increase their social media marketing spend in 2009.

clipped from www.emarketer.com

Let’s talk about budgets.
It took a while.

Even though tens of millions of users were flocking to social media sites every day, most marketers stayed away. They either didn’t understand how to join the conversations—without sounding like shills—or they were frightened away by the prospect of associating their brands with questionable content.

But things are changing.

Companies are learning how to leverage social media and tap into the rising tide of consumers participating in social network sites, blogs, wikis and Twitter.

According to the “The ROI on Social Media Marketing” report by Aberdeen Group, sponsored by Visible Technologies, marketers have developed the tools and methodologies to drive marketing ROI by listening to and learning from customers and prospects.

The money is following the methods.

Aberdeen found that 63% of the companies in their survey (defined as best-in-class) planned to increase their social media marketing budgets this year.

Are you engaging with social media brand evangelists?

“Companies use multiple approaches to identify the individuals who wield the greatest amount of influence in any given topic area and to track changes in their influence over time,” said Jeff Zabin of Aberdeen. “Best-in-class companies engage these top influencers as brand evangelists, and then track the impact of their words and actions in terms of return on marketing investment.”

eMarketer estimates that social network advertising alone will rise over 17% this year to $2.35 billion, up from $2 billion in 2008.

Friday Free For All: Do Follow Along for Free Link & Traffic Tips

admin — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 02:09:26 +0000

This Friday we will progress through a series of FREE items for the benefit of your website or blog: FREE Link Building with Do Follow ~ FREE Blog Traffic using Do Follow ~ Free Blog Policy Tools

Free Link Building: Finding Do Follow Blogs

Easily gain inbound links for your blog or website by leaving comments on Do Follow blogs. How do you find Do Follow Blogs?

Top Do Follow directories include: Do Follow Diver, the Do Follow Blogs Directory and Blogs That Follow.

Still want to find more Do Follow blogs? Google “U Comment, I Follow” – many blogs that have joined the movement display the badge, most likely with the associated alt tags.

Links from blogs with a Page Rank (PR) rating of 3 or greater that are from a related subject matter provide the greatest benefit. In other words, if your blog is a business blog, links from a PR3 business blog (like Dallas Marketing Services) are more beneficial than links from a PR0 travel blog.

Next, download the Firefox NoDoFollow Add-on – Do Follow links on any site are highlighted in blue, No Follow links are highlighted in red/pink. It doesn’t show Do Follow links within images (like all the ones in the sidebar on this blog), but it gives you a quick assessment of the Do Follow lay of the land.

Free Blog Traffic: The Do Follow Way

If you have a blog, a great way to increase traffic is to convert your blog to a Do Follow blog and get listed with the directories listed above. By rewarding readers who leave comments, blogs become more popular, discussions occur and traffic increases.

Free Blog Policy Tools

Do Follow blog owners generally implement moderated comments – the abusers will find you. We have recently published a Comment Policy to clarify which comments will be published and which will not. We found Blog Herald’s Comments Policy post to be very helpful in developing ours.

At the same time, we published a Disclosure Policy. In creating it, we used the nifty tool at DisclosurePolicy.org, which generates a blog disclosure policy based on answers to a series of questions. We then further customized the policy to fit our style and needs.

As with any tools, we recommend you consult legal or other appropriate experts prior to implementing these tools.

Have a great weekend!

Posterous: Easy, Simple Blogging Using Email for Creating Posts

admin — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 00:27:22 +0000

Know how to send an email? You too can be a blogger with Posterous.

Blogging has never been easier than with Posterous where a blog post can be created by simply sending an email to post@posterous.com. That’s it. And not just text blog posts – photos, text, MP3′s, documents, videos – all can be added to posts via email.

How’s it work? The subject line of the email becomes the post title and the text sent in the email is the post content. Attach a photo and Posterous automatically sizes and inserts the image in your post. For multiple images, Posterous creates an image gallery. Video can be added as a link or a file, with Posterous hosting the file. URLs are automatically converted to links, with YouTube links converted to an embedded player in your post.

Tagging: Tags can be added to the email by adding the tags in the subject of the email using the syntax such as ((tag: social media, blogging tools, Posterous)).

Autoposting. Autoposting is without a doubt one of my favorite features on any social media platform. Autoposting simply let’s you write in one place and have the content posted to your other social media sites automatically. Posterous currently supports autoposting to Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, Tumblr, and blogs on LiveJournal, Blogger, WordPress, Moveable Type and Typepad.

How’s that work? This post was actually sent via email to Posterous and then autoposted to Dallas Marketing Services, which is a self-hosted WordPress blog. It was further autoposted by Posterous to Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook and LiveJournal. All that with one email – is that cool or what?

Ready to get started? Simply set up a free account, add the email addresses and mobile phone numbers authorized to post content, create a profile page with an image/logo and start posting and set up your autoposting to your other social media sites. Next, stop by My Subscriptions to find to other Posterous users , be sure to check out the Posterous FAQs and subscribe to the Official Posterous blog for more information and tips on adding advanced features and formatting.

Posted via email from dallasmarketing’s posterous