Internet Policy Issue

The Federal Trade Commission has recently decided that they will begin to regulate product review bloggers. Essentially the FTC's new policy states that bloggers who are compensated in anyway for their review of a product must disclose the compensation in their blog. Many feel that these new guidelines are to prevent faulty reviews, as most bloggers are not backed by the same ethical standards as say a journalist. Also a person who is receiving payment for their review would logically be expected to give a positive review. Perhaps the group of bloggers who is most affected by these new FTC standards are those who review books. These people often receive their books for free from publishers or other sources in order to review them. There seems to be some logic behind these new FTC guidelines, however, many question their appropriateness.

I find it somewhat difficult to believe that these new FTC guidelines are appropriate. They seem to present a somewhat of a slippery slope. The internet and the thousands of bloggers that occupy it are functional in many ways based on the idea of allowing all or nothing. The internet should be an open venue for people to do with as they want. This is of course with some very serious exceptions. I would also point the FTC to the concept of Caveat emptor or buyer beware. Are we as consumers not capable of judging the validity of a bloggers' reviews for ourselves without FTC intervention? This is certainly an interesting new internet policy which is deserving of careful consideration.

PR online

The internet has become an essential venue for public relations and its importance should not be overlooked. When asked to give examples of effective and ineffective online PR attempts two examples came to mind almost immediately. In regard to what I would consider ineffective I would first point to http://www.joewilson.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=452&Itemid=80. This is a press release from Congressman Joe Wilson regarding him calling President Obama a liar during a televised address to congress. First of all I found this difficult to find on his site and in my opinion this may still represent Wilson's largest and most public mistake. The release itself also comes across as disingenuous and extremely brief. Instead of focusing on simply apologizing Wilson chooses to continue to bolster his disagreement with the president. While this may be what Wilson genuinely feels in terms of this PR attempt may not be effective to continue to voice.

In terms of an effective use of PR online I would cite http://runningahospital.blogspot.com/. This is a blog started by Paul Levy the CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. This blog allows Levy to take part in what he describes as a transparent hospital community. In this sense both positive and negative actions of the hospital can be discussed. This gives the hospital as well as its publics an effective venue for at least some degree of two way communication. The blog has proved extremely effective in the hospitals defense of attacks from the SEIU and other union organizations who question the hospitals stance on allowing its employees to unionize. This blog has been praised as innovative and effective. For all these reasons I believe that it represents and excellent example of PR online.

Ineffective Website

The first website I examined was http://www.kingsnake.com/boapage/caresheets/boaconstrictorcare.html in staying with my own website topic of snake care. This website is extremely boring and consists mainly of text on a white background. This is a care sheet with only one link and not a single picture. While it may be effective for supplying information via text it is is not very engaging at all, and contains only one link.

The next website I found ineffective through personal experience is travelocity.com. This is for the most part a well built site, and has been very successful. My issues have been ease of use of their search functions as compared to other similar sites such as cheapair.com I have always thought that travelocity's date search function is inconvenient in that it does not offer a calendar to pick dates from like other similar sites do. I have also had problems with travelocity in that it often times will not return flight fares that other similar sites have. This site is very successful and could be made much more user friendly with some slight tweaks.

The final website I would call largerly ineffective is that of a newspaper from my hometown in norther virginia http://www2.insidenova.com/. I have always found this site to be very unappealing and for the most part boring in comparison to other newspaper's sites. This site lacks much color and seems jammed with advertising everywhere you look. The navigation seems quite confusing and almost randomly placed making the site very user unfriendly. Any buttons or links on the site are very small and dull. There is a decent amount of good content offered on the site, it just seems that after cutting through all the advertising and the complicated navigation that the content becomes almost not worth it.