Quick - you have 140 characters to say something witty, include a link and disclose the fact that the company you're tweeting about happened to give you a free sample of the product so you could give it a whirl. What do you do?
The Word of Mouth Marketing Association says you should use samp, one of three new hashtags it has adopted specifically for this purpose, which tells everyone you received a sample of what you're tweeting about.
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The WOMMA released a set of guidelines this month in response to last months Federal Trade Commission adoption of a guide on endorsements and testimonials in advertising.
According to WOMMA's Social Media Marketing Disclosure Guide (.pdf), the FTC requires a disclosure of all "material connections". It defines these connections as any connection that could "affect the credibility consumers give to that blogger's statements."
The three hashtags that WOMMA is proposing are spon for sponsored tweets, paid for paid tweets and samp for when the blogger received a sample.
Depending on how you approach this, you can either use it as an AdBlock opportunity and make sure none of these sorts of tweets get through to you, you can go out and seek them, or you just be aware of what you're clicking on and why it was suggested.
We're not sure we'd necessarily recommend filtering out these tweets, though. A quick search for spon on Twitter revealed some great links. Remember, these are not necessarily just terrible ads, like you might be force fed on some website, they're just tweets where the tweeter is disclosing the full background. As more and more people are getting paid to tweet, we hope these tags will make that more clear.
With companies like McDonalds, Michelin, Dell and Porter Novelli using WOMMA guidelines, we're willing to bet you're about to start seeing these tags more and more.
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