Best Practice Disclosure: What Brands Should Do (and Why)

At WOMMA, we are launching a project to define the best ways brands and influencer/bloggers should tell the public of their "material relationship." If you are a brand and plan to try and engage influencers to get them to talk, share, create content about you, then you owe it to yourself to pay attention to this issue and establish your own principles.

Three simple reasons why:

1. If you want to activate word of mouth it must be genuine. You might be able to "incent" the first voice (G0) but their followers/readers (G1, G2, Gn) will insist on knowing what you did to engage that blogger. They need to judge the credibility for themselves. I don't care how much credibility that blogger has earned over the years, credibility and trust is established anew everyday. 

2. You will protect your brand from online backlash. Will the villagers rise up against your brand? The answer is that you just never know. Do you want to be that marketer who gets "outed" for secretly paying bloggers to post reviews? Or paying their expenses for a visit to HQ? Some brands believe their online reputation is key to their overall reputation and wouldn't like that.

3. The FTC is about to release their guidelines about testimonials and disclosure. They will require you as the brand to disclose and to motivate your influencers to do the same. The FTC wouldn't have to do this if every brand followed to principlies like WOMMA's Honesty ROI ("R" is "relationship" as in what-is-your-material-relationship)

What brands should do for best practice disclosure:
The WOMMA Disclosure Project invites industry practitioners and thought leaders (like those at the kick-off Web Summit) to articulate the form of best practice or "clear and meaningful" disclosure. New platforms and behaviors are going to require new examples. The following are my own initial thoughts for elements of best practice disclosure for a brand and the influencers they engage.

Terms of engagement
Every word of mouth marketing program that seeks to spark third parties to talk about them, their products or topics relevant to the brand must draft a "terms of engagement" and post it visibly on the program or brand Web site. I have described this document in a recent post.

• Be clear and explicit. Name amounts or ballparks of any expenses or other consideration you delivered. Was the product a loaner or a keeper? Go ahead and say. No one likes it when brands are cagey about these details.
• Ask your blogger/influencers to link to the terms of engagement or post their own version on their site. Sometimes its best if that is their first post about what they are doing.

Influencer Agreement
If you are working extensively with the same bloggers (any of the brand panels talked about here are goo dexamples of that) then craft a simple one page agreement that compels the bloggers to disclose and promise to only state their true opinion. It may not be enforceable beyond you stopping working with them but it sets the right tone.

Per post disclosure
If the inlfuencer is not part of a formal program with its own badge (think: Walmart 11 Moms or The Fab5), then there posts and comments should include a refernce and link to the terms of enagement, program, or their on-site disclosure statement - e.g. "... this post is part of my BrandX series. Click here for the terms of engagement." 

• Tweets - here's a special case. The format is short and not always connected to your full bio or your blog. Tweets should be marked whenever practical. When I write about a client, I almost always mark the Tweet with (cl) to indicate it's a client. If I were an influencer and loaned a new computer to try (like maybe an Alienware - hint, hint) and I blogged and tweeted about the experience, how should I mark those tweets? Alienware didn't pay me. The entire material relationship is the 2 month loan of the computer (I have never done this. This is just a hypothetical). I can't call them "sponsor" nor can I call them "partner" as both are too formal and inaccurate.

Three solutions:

• Add mention of the program in your Twitter bio page with a link to the Terms of Engagement on your blog
• Add (disc) to your tweet, preferably with a link to the Terms of Engagement.
• If you are simply linking to a post that is fully diclosed, the Tweet, itself, can go without. But if you are stating opinion in a tweet, then mark it.

 

Site badges
Many sustained programs have the influencers post badges on their main blogs identifying them as part of a group program or brand panel. That badge is good for everyone. It works best when it links to the prgram description complete with a Terms of Engagement. It serves everyone best if that badge is above the fold to be in line of sight with the latest posts. The influencer still needs a per post disclosure to deliver via  RSS feed or if she syndicates content anywhere.

Social media bio
By adding a statement in your "about us" or bio page about your involvement with a particular brand or your likelihood to engage with brands from time to time, you have gone the extra mile to be clear with people.

Align with WOMMA
WOMMA has the industry standard ethics policies including policies on disclosure. If you are a member, then those policies becme your own. They will protect you, your brand and the consumer. It is a great way top get a large organization aligned about a non-partisan standard. Just tell everyone in the marcom disciplines that they need to behave according to the WOMMA ethics.

What do you think is "best practice disclosure?"

Comments

[g14matthew.wordpress.com]

John, it looks like you are not only putting out possible best practice guidelines for brands, but for bloggers too. Which is good, because it seems to me like bloggers have the larger responsibility about being honest about their relationships with brands.

Brands will always engage opportunities that allow them to connect with influential people and media and broadcast their message to an audience they may not have previously reached before, right? Bloggers have pre-established trust with their audiences and they'll be the ones nailed to the credibility cross if people find out they are shilling a brand or product and not being honest about it. What might reflect somewhat poorly on the brand reflects worse on the established blogger who tries to hide things.

I think that the Influencer Agreement is a great starting point for this kind of honesty. I'm curious, do you feel like most bloggers will be open to the idea of following a set of rules created by the same brand that wants that blogger to talk about them? Even if they are a set of rules that say "be honest about your opinion and honest about the fact that we've engaged you to do this"? Do you feel that this can quickly become a slippery slope where a brand's legal department dictates more and more how a blogger can communicate about a brand?