The social media mavens and blogosphere are all abuzz about the recent FTC rulings on bloggers that seek to govern how  social media participants engage in endorsements and testimonials, and the conversation at our little San Diego interactive marketing agency has been — well — lively.  Seems like everyone on our social media team has a point of view, and our interactive and digital experts have their own perspective, and let’s not forget the marketing strategy leaders on our advertising agency team – god knows they’ve always got an opinion to share as well.

There is one thing that we all agree on though: this is a game changer.  Yet, this is also the brave new world of public relations.

I fall into the camp of “wow this is really scary and qualifies as a mad power grab“, and yet others see it as a good way to control the sometimes rampant and often scurrilous use of blogs by advertisers to sway public opinion about goods and services.

The Public Relations Society of America does a nice job of encapsulating the details of this new FTC “Advisory” here.

There are many examples of unscrupulous bloggers who take free products from companies and then write glowing endorsements about them, never disclosing they got these products for free — or worse yet, might have been paid for the promotional mention.  And there are a ton of twitter hacks who tweet nothing but promotional and sales-oriented messages about whatever product or service they are shilling at the time – be it teeth whitening, get-rich-quick schemes or, ahem, “dating opportunities”.

Any of us on the “good side” of PR and marketing would agree this is wrong.  This has been the topic of debate in the blogger community for quite some time, and will undoubtedly be a major theme of the upcoming BlogWorld Expo convention in Las Vegas this week.  Good thing we’ve got a couple of our people going so they can report back here (stay tuned for blog posts from Indra Gardiner and Callan Green coming soon).

Yet on the other hand, we have had the opportunity to work with many reputable, talented and wise bloggers that serve as important communications lines for entire audiences and communities of people.  These leaders in social media — whether they are mommy bloggers, bloggers about pets, lovers of chocolate, experts on real estate  — all seek to use their blogs to communicate with people that share their interest.

A case in point:

Recently, we have been working with Jer’s Chocolates to help the company gain national attention for their amazing and delicious peanut butter/chocolate confections (okay FTC, consider this my full disclosure – we were paid for this service).  We sent elaborate kits of chocolate on ice, along with press materials and other items, to a collection of both traditional media and bloggers nationwide.  A number of these deliveries and pitches resulted in great stories written by editors who fell in love with Jer’s Chocolates.  Under the new FTC guidelines, the bloggers would have had to disclose these chocolate deliveries as endorsements. But not the traditional media. When you read the pages of Bon Appetit, do you notice the writers mentioning they received free product from companies they write about?

Nope.  Not required — because they are trusted editorial sources we expect will behave with ethics and standards.  So why would we expect anything less from bloggers?

Supplying product to the media in order for them to write about it has been a practice for as long as the practice of PR has existed.  And isn’t social media – blogging, tweeting, Facebooking, and more – an outgrowth and evolution of public relations, and ultimately the editorial process itself?

Besides, as is typical in these Federal “land grabs” no one has really thought about enforcement.  Are the Blog Police really going to track down and prosecute mommy blogger Dooce because Heather wrote about Huggies? OK, maybe Dooce is too high profile an example.  Instead, what about local, gifted (and very funny) bloggers HipMamaB or DadCentric or SanDiegoFoodstuff, who ocasionally make product references? Or the thousands of other bloggers with opinions about products, both sponsored and not?

I say chill out FTC.  I’m sure you have bigger fish to fry.