Imitating a costomer to promote your business will be a criminal offence from Monday, 26 May 08 (as may be affiliate marketing)
The new regulations that come in to force on Monday (The Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008) have far reaching implications.
Some test cases will follow no doubt, but one clear implication is for the pretty widespread practice of a company or its staff writing up a good review for the company's own product on a reviews site - while pretending to be real customers (e.g. on Amazon or Trip Advisor).
We know customers are cynical when they read lots of positive reviews for a product, all using the same grammar and language. We know books on Amazon that seem to include fake reviews from their own authors, in order to push sales up. Users are also increasingly sceptical about hotel reviews if they gush too much or have a slight negative that usually turns out to be a positive, supposedly to make you trust them ('the only negative thing about this hotel is that perhaps its staff is too attentive, and you end up worrying that they love it so much they never go home').
PR companies using blogs to build up a 'buzz' for a product will also need to study the new regulations carefully, as will bloggers in their employ (also known as 'floggers').
Another implication, suggested by Mike Young in his blog, is that affiliate marketing emails where the affiliate praises the product in the hope of gaining a commission will also fall under the same legislation.
Of course there will need to be some high profile examples to really deter companies and individuals and bring the message home. It also remains to be seen how co-operative review sites will be with investigations that seek to establish the truth of an allegation. Without their logs of server activity (user details, IP address and timestamp etc.), it would often be difficult to nail an offender, and simply suspecting someone is reviewing their own product is not just cause to seize information. I suppose this means that if Mike Young is correct about affiliate marketing, that's where the first scythe will fall - low hanging fruit for the authorities.
The regulations also introduce quite a number of other protections, some of which are covered here.