ReadWriteWeb

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.

New rules from the Federal Trade Commission, requiring bloggers to disclose free gifts from companies whose products they review, came into effect on December 1st and the first major announcement of 2010 just occurred today.

The Google Nexus One mobile phone was unveiled this afternoon and all the members of the press who were on-site for the announcements received free phones from Google. This is the most-anticipated phone to hit the market in years. It's like a unicorn sparkling with magic, perhaps. Almost no one at all has disclosed getting a free unit in writing their reviews.

The new FTC guidelines for disclosure by bloggers have stirred up some anger among bloggers accustomed to getting free stuff and blogging about it without the heavy hand of governmental Big Brother yadda yadda - oh, you can finish the sentence yourself.

Best known as a site that indexes and verifies leaked documents, Wikileaks exists as a space where whistleblowers, journalists and bloggers can speak out against corruption without fear of employer or government retaliation. According to a recent article in IT World, the organization will soon offer publishers a chance to get in on the action. The group will give publishers the opportunity to embed a Wikileaks submission form on their websites.

Think of this post as a mashup of two of my favorite social media books: Naked Conversations meets Tactical Transparency.

And in the interest of transparency, I should disclose that I thought about slipping my Amazon affiliate code into those links, but decided not to.