The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has recently released a comprehensive set of guidelines to bring greater transparency and fairness to online reviews and testimonials. This update makes significant improvements to hold businesses accountable for misleading practices in how they solicit, curate, and display reviews. For businesses and organizations in the United States who rely on video reviews as a marketing tool, you must be aware of these rules.
In this post we’ll break down two key areas that will impact you: the prohibition on incentivizing only positive reviews and the requirement to represent reviews fairly and inclusively when displaying them as “all” consumer feedback.
1. Prohibition on Incentives for Only Positive Reviews
Under the FTC’s new guidelines you cannot incentivize reviews with a particular sentiment, i.e. reward someone for a specifically positive or negative review. If you choose to incentivize reviews (which we recommend to get a higher number of responses), you must do so in a way that allows customers to leave feedback that reflects their genuine experience—positive, neutral, or negative.
Tips for Businesses:
- Don’t Selectively Incentivize. You cannot say, “Leave a 5-star review and receive a discount” or offer gifts in exchange for positive feedback. Instead, you must make it clear that consumers are free to provide any type of feedback, whether positive or negative.
- Clearly Communicate Incentives. If you do provide an incentive for a video review, this must be disclosed clearly on your website or on social media. If there’s any perception that a customer was encouraged to speak only positively about a product due to incentives, it can create a compliance issue.
- Focus on Authenticity. The whole point of the FTC guidelines is to help provide an authentic consumer experience online. As a business it is in your best incentive to collect and share real stories from your real customers, fostering trust and credibility in your digital marketing.
2. Misrepresentation of Reviews as “All” Reviews
Additionally, The FTC now requires that you must not misrepresent a curated collection of reviews based on sentiment as being ALL reviews. For example, you cannot showcase only 5 star reviews, but position them as all customer reviews on your website.
Tips for Businesses:
- Your Reviews section must not be curated. If you are adding video reviews to your website, they must include all reviews, not just the most positive ones. Any misrepresentation here could lead to penalties.
- Highlighting your favorite videos can be ok. You can showcase your favorite reviews, however they cannot be positioned as all reviews. For example, having a filter to select between 1 to 5 stars, but only showing 5 star videos would not be acceptable.
- Think about Stories instead. Your customers have amazing stories that will inspire and engage others online, you just need to ask them. Don’t just think about asking for a review, but for a story where your product or service has impacted their life.
How StoryTap can help you
At StoryTap we help brands collect and distribute amazing video reviews and stories from their real customers. We know that these videos are some of the most powerful online assets, but collecting them can be difficult.
In order to make it easy to adhere to these new rules, StoryTap provides a number of features to help you:
- Balanced story prompting. The core of StoryTap is a prompting experience, where you can guide the story the customers tell. We make it easy to get a balanced review, for example “I would/wouldn’t recommend this product because …”. Not only does this meet the guidelines, but it means that even with less positive videos, you are getting valuable feedback from your customers.
- Unique story collection. Not only does the prompting mean you get a balanced review, but you can also ask for really unique stories, for example why your new baby monitor helps you sleep better at night, or how your cat just loves the pet food you give them.
- Built in incentives & disclosure. StoryTap makes it easy to add your incentive to the platform, and then clearly disclose this incentive on your website using the StoryTap web embed. This ensures that shoppers will clearly see the incentive provided, without any extra work on your part.
- Powerful web embed. StoryTap’s web embed makes it easy to add videos to your website. Include a star rating filter to showcase all your Video Reviews, or create a highlights section to show your favorites – and automatically include the incentive disclosure if needed.
- So much more!
Try StoryTap for Free, or book a demo to learn more about how real customer video reviews and stories can grow your business.
