Asides

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FTC Guidelines for Bloggers and Social Media Influencers

The Federal Trade Commission has put together a fantastic set of FAQs for Endorsement Disclosures to satisfy its criteria.

If you are a blogger, influencer or other paid endorser (including someone who receives free products, incentives or “in kind” compensation), you’ll definitely want to review them.

If your company sends products or other compensation to bloggers, social media influencers, or other paid endorsers, it’ll also be worth reviewing—you may have responsibilities where educating or monitoring your influencers are concerned.

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New Small Business Podcast

I’m really excited about a new project I’m working on with Rod Thomson and Josh Muccio: The Growth Show is a podcast focused on helping small businesses grow.

Each of us comes with a little different perspective: Rod is 30-year veteran journalist who specializes in helping businesses understand and work with media, Josh is a young entrepreneur who has already flipped his first company after building a fantastic presence online with local SEO tactics. We published our first episode on Friday, and it promises to be a lot of fun!

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New Social Tool

Recently I started experimenting with a new social tool called Known.

Using webmentions and other fun innovations that seem to be originating with IndieWebCamp, Known gives content creators powerful features that allow them to syndicate their content to multiple platforms and pull in interactions (“likes,” “retweets” and so on) back to their own sites in order to maintain a permanent copy that is under their own control.

You can see more of what I’m playing with by checking out my personal Known site: social.thedavidjohnson.com.

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Join Michael and Bruce

My friends at Ortiz | Kleinberg, LLC are launching a nifty campaign this week to connect past clients up to their new community. A direct mail sequence will ask those interested to visit JoinMichaelAndBruce.com and enter their email addresses.

The firm is offering Publix gift cards to everyone who signs up. Alternatively, their clients can choose to donate, and the firm will give the gift cards to Habitat for Humanity of Sarasota in their honor.

The offer is only open to past clients, so if the names and email addresses don’t match up to their client database, then the gift card offer isn’t valid. (Sorry! If you haven’t worked with them in the past, this isn’t for you.)

Neat idea! We’ll be watching with interest!

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Dropbox Pro: More Space, More Features

Dropbox today announced that “Pro” accounts, which pay $9.95/month, will get an automatic bump to 1TB of storage (from 100GB). Nice!

Even better, we’re getting new features like remote wipe for devices, and something I’ve wanted for a long time: expirations for shared links.

Once you send out a shared link, you no longer have any control over how many times it’s shared or used by those to whom you have not intentionally granted permissions.

They’ve also added passwords for shared links, which is nice for when you want to have a little additional control over stuff that gets out in the wild.

Granted, it’s still remarkably easy for a malicious person to push your files out to the world, so these are perhaps small blessings, but nevertheless, I feel they’ll be helpful.

Read the full announcement from Dropbox here.

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Florida’s Economic Recovery Ranked #6 In Nation

Business Insider ranked the 50 states based upon various—arguably arbitrary—factors and placed Florida in the number 6 position.

Notably, the report cited an 8.9% increase in statewide housing prices (measured from Q1 2013 to Q1 2014), a 3.1% bump in payroll jobs (June 2014 vs. June 2013) and a higher-than average growth in the state’s working-age population.

Ahead of Florida in Business Insider’s rankings: Colorado, California, Texas, Arizona, and Utah.

The team responsible for the report, which was published August 4, 2014, posted separately about their methodologies.