Slashdot Mirror
UK Targets Twitter and Blog Endorsements
krou writes "The UK's Office of Fair Trading (OFT) is cracking down on 'Twitter users and bloggers using their online presence to endorse products and companies without clearly stating their relationship with the brand.' They described such endorsements, including 'comments about services and products on blogs and microblogs such as Twitter,' as 'deceptive' under fair trading rules. While the US Federal Trade Commission already requires such endorsements to be labelled with 'ad' or 'spon,' the UK doesn't have any such requirement. In relation to this, the OFT has launched an investigation into Handpicked Media, because the OFT is 'insisting that it must clearly state when promotional comments have been paid for.'"
depends - what's he selling?
This space available.
Pretty much every commercial is a random dude saying more or less 'buy this' and millions are likely to. All because some random dude told them 'buy this.
Attention... all grammer nazi"s! Is they're anything; wrong with: my post,
I miss the more innocent age of the internet before there was astroturfing.
These days, I more or less assume any favorable opinion about a commercial product is astroturfed, unless I have compelling evidence to the contrary.
" For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely connected with this."-Albert
Pretty much every commercial is a random dude saying more or less 'buy this' and millions are likely to. All because some random dude told them 'buy this.
Recommendations mean much more when they come from people who actually bought the product. Amazon and eBay have that property, because the recommendation system and the payment system are connected. Yelp, Citysearch, and their imitators do not. If recommendations are made to work, it will be by someone in the payment chain.
I don't know if I would go so far as to call it a matter of "ethics."
Fraudulently pretending to be an objective third party for financial gain. That's ethics alright and the government should come down on them like a ton of bricks. Such people should be in jail if they make a habit of it.
Think it doesn't matter? If it didn't agents would be happy to announce their affiliation. For some strange reason they don't. Why would that be I wonder?
Apart from anything else company legal structures require accountability because they act as proxies for real people and when company agents can be anonymous there is no accountability.
But less government invading the lives of the private sector the better.
In general true but not when there is this amount of fraud going on.
---
How many million man hours has the advertising industry cost today?
The difference with a commercial is that you know who paid the random dude to tell you to do so.
For those dopey slashdotters like me who assumed most astroturfing is the PR dept of a major firm coming back from their Friday lunch, follow the link in the summary. Took a random path through handpickedmedia's website and then read the twitter posts of PerfHappyMum. Seems just like every other life coach (what the hell are THEY?);
children asleep two hours early!
soon followed by
Just leaving the preview screening of "tangled", most refreshing cartoon since Shreck, loved it
"She" is in the parenting "channel" of handpicked's website but on Twitter there is no indication it's paid for. Assume that a significant amount of the conversation is with other handpickedmedia's 'channels'? If they can investigate the volume going up in the adverts (what did happen to that Ofcom report? Anyone know?) then this is an organisation of cynicism that has shocked me.
The "Like" thing is usually true, or they just want to see the hidden picture / enter the competition that requires them to "like" it first. However, the "this sucks" portion is generally not true. If someone says something sucks on such sites, they *normally* think it does.
However, the MUCH bigger question - what idiot listens to their Facebook/Twitter friend's opinion when they are buying something for themselves, without at least asking *WHY* it sucks? People always tell me that X sucks but with no explanation. People still can't explain to me why, all of a sudden, Windows XP sucks. Or OpenOffice sucks. Or Opera sucks. If they provide reasons, those reasons are usually exactly WHY I want to use it (i.e. Opera has a built-in mail client and doesn't execute ActiveX). They normally don't like it, or it's not suited to their way of working, or it has problems they don't like, or (infinitely more likely) they haven't *really* given it a fair chance and it's fashionable to say anything non-standard sucks. That's *their* opinion and doesn't automatically mean that everyone works the same or, even if they do, that they will find it as sucky.
There are friends I have that, if they HATE a movie, I'm almost guaranteed to like it and vice versa. There are friends who piss their money away on gadgets that I think are useless or that don't suit my method of working at all. There is no point in me owning a machine that I can't easily write my own software for, for example - so their iPods and iPhones and iBooks are effectively a "games console" computer in my opinion, whereas my old XP image that's followed me onto four different laptops is much better AND plays all the games I want. They don't see it that way so my "old, sucky" laptop whose efficiency and speed WOULD be destroyed within a few months of *their* use of the same machine through mismanagement is actually perfect for me.
We bought the head of the school I work at an iPad when he retired. He was an old-school computing guy, though, so he sold it on eBay shortly afterwards. But the 600MHz Mini-ITX with triple boot DOS, Linux and Windows XP that I built for him, with built-in Soundblaster compatibility, was a million times more suitable and he took it with him to his house in the South of France. To anyone else, it probably "sucked", but for him it was perfect. I have friends that only buy Sony. I have friends that spend money on Farmville. I have friends that live by their iPhone and yet can't work out how to use 1% of it's functions. I have friends that can't operate my laptop because the touchpad (again, personal preference) is slightly offset to the left and doesn't have a defined scroll area, but it's perfect for me, because Autoplay is completely disable, and because to play a DVD you have to load VLC manually. I have a friend who only buys whatever Which magazine tells him to buy.
"Suckiness" is dependent on the user. Opinions matter but only of those people whose opinions matter to me. The chances of random "Yeah, this is cool" or "This sucks" actually affecting *ANYTHING* I do are incredibly minimal unless it's backed up by reasoning, experience and trust. You have to weight each opinion by those factors and if you do that, any astroturfing will actually end up on the bottom of the pile rather than the top. And even among the people I speak to the most, there are some where I wouldn't *touch* anything they recommended because they are inherently different to me. The person I know who works at Rackspace has been brainwashed, so I instantly discredit their opinion on hosting and network hardware because they try to simulate the datacentre they work in inside everyone's house including their own - it's *not* suitable for the majority of cases and even when it *is* suitable, I happen to think that Rackspace suck and most of what they do internally sucks. If I didn't discredit their opinion, I'd basically be up to my nose in overly expensive Cisco hardware and yet have substandard capabilities compared to what I hav
The problem is with all of the laws that we have that there is _no_ intention of enforcing. Want a really good chance at a valid copyright case? Just arrest anyone walking around with a portable media player. We have no right to rip music from CDs that we own to digital formats, so the chances are that most people on the streets today are law breakers. But we have this law anyway.
Bad laws only serve to bring all law into disrepute.