The FTC announced new rules to govern social media. The entire document of rules is quite extensive so I have bulleted what seem to be the three most prevalent regulations:

• Any and all “material connections” between bloggers and advertisers MUST be disclosed when an endorsement is made on behalf of the advertiser. This includes monetary compensation AND freebies of any kind. This rule also includes employees. If an employee of a corporation tweets about how great a new service or product is, they must disclose they are a paid employee of that corporation.

•Bloggers are responsible for any false or unsubstantiated claims they make on behalf of an advertiser. Currently, the common practice used to avoid penalties is the disclaimer “results are not typical.” Now, advertisers AND bloggers must breakdown the atypical results and fully discuss the “expected results” in complete detail. For example, if an advertiser sends a prominent beauty blogger a free sample of a new lotion to try and review, the blogger is responsible for any claims she makes about the lotion AND disclosing that she received the product for free. If the blogger uses the lotion and it cures her eczema, she is responsible for making that claim on her blog. If the claim that the lotion cures eczema is unsubstantiated by the advertiser, the blogger is on the hook for her statement.

•A third rule states that any celebrity that endorses a product or service in any informal way, including a talk show appearance or press tour, is responsible for disclosing the nature of the endorsement. Basically, unless a celebrity appears in a traditional TV or print ad, they must make a clear statement regarding their relationship to any product, service or location they endorse. For example, if a “well-known actress” visits The Tonight Show and talks about her great experience at a popular plastic surgery clinic in downtown L.A., she must disclose if she is being compensated by the clinic for the endorsement OR if she received her treatments for free.  

The first thing I noticed upon entering 140|The Twitter Conference LA was the over-abundance of laptops and mobile devices and the amount of people looking down at their computers while a speaker was in the midst of a presentation — and not just any speaker, but THE Biz Stone (@biz), co-founder of Twitter.  Of course, his feelings weren’t hurt because everyone was furiously posting tweets via his brainchild, Twitter, that were fed into the live stream of information in 140-character bursts being followed around the world through the hashtag #140tc.  To the left-hand side of the stage stood a projector screen with a live feed of the Twitter posts tagged with #140tc, demonstrating the diverse thoughts, opinions and comments happening in the moment all on the same topic, and visually displaying the incredibly fast-moving and immediate nature of Twitter.  

Favorite Resources for Efficiently Organizing and Managing Social Media Campaigns

1. Tweetdeck.com or seismic.com to view multiple accounts, group friends, ping facebook and twitter at the same time!
2. Hootsuite.com manage multiple twitter profiles, measure your success, pre-schedule tweets for things like product launches, press releases etc.
3. PingFM takes it one step further and allows you to update Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook and even Skype! Use Wisely and consider the “Rules of Engagement” and etiquette for each site
4. Notify.me is one of our favorites but can be dangerous! This is like your personal digital paperboy. This crazy little app that allows you to syndicate any sort of feed from any type of source and have it stream back to you however you want. E-mail, IM, SMS, apps, widgets…anything you use regularly, you can have your updates delivered to it.
5. A close second to notify is igoogle set as your home page to receive the kind of news you want from your favorite blogs, rss feeds, newspapers and your gmail on the same screen. Your own personal newspaper…
6. www.search.twitter.com search for any conversation about your business or you taking place on twitter, use for industry and competitive research! Find it all in one place!

More and more, social media is shaping the way we communicate and interact with customers. Here are Zenzi’s top 10 tips to increase visibility online and ensure your messages don’t get lost in the information abyss:

More and more, citizen reporters are shaping the news and the information we receive. Time Magazine named “YOU” as person of the year as a result of the citizen reporting trend. We now find information and make purchasing decisions based on a variety of different sources that include blogs, vlogs, social networking sites, viral emails, and e-commerce rating systems. Each one of us is a journalists if we want to be and can be published in a number of locations in a number of ways on the web. Our tendency to trust each other more that we trust institutions, media outlets or even the government prompts us to turn to feedback from one another about what is truly going on in the world. Wikipedia is a citizen generated information library and one of the most frequently visited sites on the web and “google” is officially a verb. Zenzi offers a few tips on how to get your feet wet in the citizen-generated media world.