Product Testing, Free Stuff and Blogging

Ok, so I had mentioned a few weeks ago the new FTC ruling about blogging and product promotion. Ever since then, I always look for the disclosures on blogs. Some of them have them on posts when they are reviewing an item and some of them have a general page that says that some product opinions are the result of a free product to test, which seems to meet the guidelines of disclosure.

The interesting part is that some bloggers are saying exactly where the got the items from, which led me to MyBlogSpark. One blog that I read frequently disclosed that a product had come to them through MyBlogSpark, and I have a blog, so I thought- hey, why have I not tried to do this? So, I signed up, and pretty rapidly I got an email saying that they had a General Mills cereal thing going on, and did I want a bunch of cereal to test.

So that led to one thought- Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Next to C-3POs and Smurfberries, which they don't actually make anymore, Cinnamon Toast Crunch is one of the best cereals ever made. So, testing CTC was no problem whatsoever. I actually got several coupons for the really big cereal boxes- not the tiny ones that they keep on the bottom shelf- from General Mills through MyBlogSpark. And yes, they were tasty. And yes, I probably ate too many of them because there were four giant boxes full of CTC sitting there staring at me.

So, the real question then is how to blog about them. Do I just do a review about the cereal? That's not really my style unless it's a review article. Do I just talk about getting free items? That's probably not what they had in mind. Do I just talk about disclosure and then disclose that I got some stuff? That's really has nothing to do with the thing that I was reviewing. So, I figured some type of hybrid was pretty much what I can do. I hope you liked it.