By Laura Giardina

When the new FTC rules were introduced in December 2009 regulating all bloggers and requiring them to disclose any products or services given in exchange for a blog post, we weren’t really too concerned. We actually embraced this level of transparency as a positive and very welcome contribution to social media practices. However, we were a bit worried that the new guidelines would dissuade bloggers from offering their services for product reviews.

With much delight we’re happy to say that since the FTC Guidelines were introduced, our relationships with bloggers keeps growing, enabling us to secure incredible, targeted product reviews for our clients with some of the most influential mom bloggers and vloggers – all with full disclosure. Because of our growing success since the new guidelines were introduced, I wasn’t surprised by the findings in a new survey of mom bloggers recently posted on MediaPost. According to the new survey of 130 influential mom bloggers, not much has changed since the new guidelines; they are still accepting the same number of sponsored product reviews and the number of brands or agencies pitching them sponsored product reviews has remained about the same, as well.

While we make every effort to follow the new guidelines, it’s amazing to us when we see social media campaigns and bloggers still tempting the system and not complying to the new rules; however, rest assured, the RL&A staff prides itself on following these guidelines and will not work with bloggers who are not willing to follow the new guidelines. But I have to say, as a PR executive who executes blogger outreach on a daily basis, I find there are very few bloggers who aren’t following the new guidelines, which is why I don’t think much has changed. Mom bloggers are excited to review products and can be a trusted resource for both the brands they review and their ever-growing audience of consumers.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 12th, 2010 at 12:58 am and is filed under Chit Chatter. 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.