Social media police in action.

Will bloggers go the way of fax machines?

USA Today recently reported that 54% of companies completely block Facebook, while another 35% apply some form of limits. That means only 11% don’t put limits on Facebook use in the work force.

www.socialnomics.net offers, “Why does this feel like déjà vu? Maybe it feels familiar because a few years ago many companies banned Web mail (Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, etc.) in the work place. A few years before that, companies banned the Internet at the work place. And it’s not just companies that placed these types of bans; teachers often ban mobile phones in the classroom as well.

Banning social media at work is:

  •  Analogous to banning the Internet

  •  Analogous to banning the phone because you might make a personal phone call

  •  Analogous to banning paper and pens because you might pass a note that isn't related to class or work.

  •  Could potentially signal to workers and future recruits that companies just don’t get it”

Recently, the FTC jumped into the fray with blogger guidelines for advertising and endorsements as covered by the Pittsburgh Post Gazette:

New FTC guidelines take on bloggers

Disclosure rules now include social media

Sunday, December 6, 2009

The 81-page document would never make a popular blog post. It's full of footnotes, endless acronyms and the word "therein."

But the latest guidelines on advertising and endorsements from the Federal Trade Commission -- its first new post on the subject in almost 30 years -- have stretched the agency's purview to the online world. That means the FTC is taking on a borderless country that's used to doing the rankling, not getting rankled itself.

It's common practice now for old-school advertising to follow FTC rules, which require transparency between endorsers and the advertisers who pay them. These updated guides extend FTC disclosure rules to social media -- the world of neighborhood bloggers and amateur pundits.

Announced in October and effective Dec. 1, the new FTC guidelines have awakened bloggers to a bureaucratic world that jars with a culture that celebrates populism and casualness. Besides, no place is as self-policing as the Internet, where falsity is met by low page views and, when the gloves come off, shouting in the comments section.

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09340/1018533-96.stm

How about when the media traveled with the President on the recent trip to China; there were tons of complaints from media about China’s firewall. The Hill, known among those who influence policy as a "must read" in print and online, covered the topic:

http://tinyurl.com/ykkx38o

Tweeting news media complain about China's social media firewall

By Jordan Fabian - 11/16/09 01:02 PM ET

Several members of the press corps traveling with President Barack Obama in China took to Twitter to complain about the China's effective ban on social networking sites.

Fox News Senior White House correspondent Major Garrett, ABC News Senior White House correspondent Jake Tapper and NBC News political director Chuck Todd all cited difficulties accessing the micro-blogging site this weekend while on the Chinese portion of the president's week-long trip to Asia.

And of course the gray lady of journalism, The New York Times, weighed in:

Soon, Bloggers Must Give Full Disclosure

By TIM ARANGO

For bloggers who review products, this means that the days of an unimpeded flow of giveaways may be over. More broadly, the move suggests that the government is intent on bringing to bear on the Internet the same sorts of regulations that have governed other forms of media, like television or print.

It crushes the idea that the Internet is separate from the kinds of concerns that have been attached to previous media,” said Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University.

Richard Cleland, assistant director of the division of advertising practices at the F.T.C., said: “We were looking and seeing the significance of social media marketing in the 21st century and we thought it was time to explain the principles of transparency and truth in advertising and apply them to social media marketing. Which isn’t to say that we saw a huge problem out there that was imperative to address.”

Still, sites like Twitter and Facebook, as well as blogs, have offered companies new opportunities to pitch products with endorsements that carry a veneer of authenticity because they seem to be straight from the mouth — or keyboard — of an individual consumer. In some cases, companies have set up product review blogs that appear to be independent. One such case involved Urban Nutrition, a seller of supplements, that ran Web sites like WeKnowDiets.com and GoogleDiets.com. The National Advertising Review Council, which governs the industry’s self-regulatory programs, said the sites were “formatted as independent product-review blogs,...”

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/06/business/media/06adco.html?_r=1#

There is no perfect science to regulating social media. No doubt this will continue to evolve as the world of social and traditional media collide and figure out how to co-exist. It can only get more interesting.