by the letters s, i, t, o, i, and d. I'm making this full disclosure to avoid running afoul of the Federal Trade Commission.
New technologies get abused...happens all the time, every time. When something new comes along there will be someone out there that will figure out how to use it a manner not prescribed by law, good sense, or for the betterment of society. While I can't find a record of it, I'm sure that it wasn't too long after automobile technology advanced to the point of cars being faster than horses that some bank robber clued in to the idea of a getaway CAR.
Before the wide use of blogs and Twitter, nobody told stories beyond two or three of their six degrees of separation because the connection gets too confusing. The cousin of a friend of my brother's tire guy told my brother's tire guy's friend's cousin that.... Now it's much simpler.. I read in a blog... or I got a text from Twitter....
It was inevitable that as soon as this started happening on a reasonable scale that some marketeer would realize that old marketing adage "giving people who disperse information free stuff will usually result in them dispersing positive information about the free stuff you give them" could be expanded into this new realm. Give these new information hobbyists (as opposed to the information professionals) free or discounted stuff and they will disperse positive information about the free stuff you give them.
Apparently this concept has caused more than one head to explode at the Federal Trade Commission. The explodees's compadres attempted several times to put the heads back together but they kept re-exploding. So they did what all government entities do...created a new rule. Apparently, the FTC has now declared that if you are a user of "consumer originated media" and you get something free or at a discount and you make positive comments about it in one of these "consumer originated media" then you have to disclose the free-ness or discounted-ness of the stuff. Houston, we have a problem...
A personal example... I'm on Twitter. I follow a mixture of local and national news sources, bloggers, ordinary folks, and local businesses. Sometimes these local businesses run contests. Sometimes I enter these contests and sometimes I win. I answered a trivia question by Eureka Pizza and won three large pizzas and 2 liters of soda.. It was pretty darn good pizza and I said so on Twitter. How am I suppose to make full disclosure of the free-ness of the pizza and tell folks how good it was in 140 characters? Same with the Tower of Power tickets I won from the Walton Arts Center..
And not to give them any ideas but will this concept be further expanded to include the free samples one gets while doing their grocery shopping? Seems to me this whole thing is a solution looking for a problem. Do people really go off and spend a lot of money based on the opinion of some blogger or twitterer that they don't know? I'm thinking if you go and spend very much money based solely on the recommendation of some person you don't know except 140 characters at a time or through a rambling diatribe...then maybe you deserve to have to put up with a crappy product. That'll learn ya...
Oddly enough there was already a 'rule' in place to cover these circumstances. A rule that was created when ancient latin was the franca lingua... caveat emptor (Let the buyer beware.)
Thank you for your attention to this matter... if you correctly arrange today's sponsors you might discover what I think about certain government rule creators....
...take care.. t
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TW went on and on about all of the horrible things I'm going to have to disclose and all of the things I might not be able to tweet that I always tweet. It was enough to scare me into not typing for a whole ten minutes.
ReplyDeleteNext time the Starbucks Barista wants to discount my drink just because I'm a regular, I'm going to have to tell her to charge me full price cuz I might forget to change my loopt update to say discounted quad grande nonfat caramel macchiato. ;-)
Ah, my dear Denise... you've hit exactly the key to this.
ReplyDeleteThis will simply be another rule widely flaunted and whose enforcement is routinely ignored...until you happen to piss off the wrong authority figure.
As Ayn Rand said, "There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one "makes" them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws."