On Monday 1 March 2011 the extended Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) remit will come into effect. A lot has been made of this ruling and the impact it will have on social media and digital marketing.

The ASA previously stated the remit will cover “advertisements and other marketing communications by or from companies, organisations or sole traders on their own websites, or in other non-paid-for space online under their control, that are directly connected with the supply or transfer of goods, services, opportunities and gifts, or which consist of direct solicitations of donations as part of their own fund-raising activities.”

One of the key takeaways for me is user generated content. As soon as a company is seen to respond to UGC, for instance a post on its Facebook page or Twitter account this is viewed as ‘official’ marketing communication and comes under the CAP code.  Any claims made (even by users) within that content will have to be accurate and agencies need to be aware of their new responsibilities.

In addition, the ASA has added a number of possible sanctions for those falling foul of the new ruling:

• Enhanced name and shame policy - providing details of an advertiser and the non-compliant marketing communication on a special part of the ASA website
• Removal of paid-for search advertising – ads that link to the page hosting the non-compliant marketing communication may be removed with the agreement of the search engines
• ASA paid-for search advertisements – the ASA could place advertisements online highlighting an advertiser’s continued non-compliance.

The remit covers all marketing activity from organisations operating in the UK regardless of top level domain (co.uk, .com, .net). However, it does not cover classified private advertisements, press releases and other public relations material, editorial content, political advertisements, corporate reports or investor relations activity.

You can find out more information from the ASA’s website.

Within minutes of the Guardian publishing its ‘story’, bloggers and citizen journalists were busy assembling the facts to find out what was being blocked from publication – it didn’t take long to work out it was Trafigura. This was then widely reported over the internet and the ‘Streisand effect’ took hold once more – namely if you try and gag/block/censor something you will make people doubly determined to unearth it.

This once again highlights the democraticization of the internet. Whilst ‘super-injunctions’ may be granted the borderless nature of the social web will continue to find ways past them and ensure organisations are held to account. What one court in a county rules can not easily be implemented on the World Wide Web, which is made harder by servers being hosted in multiple countries.

As Rob Brown said in Public Relations and the Social Web: “The rise of citizen journalism should provide positive sustainable benefits for society as a whole. It is reasonable to assume that it will bring pressure to support the continued ascent of ethical business practice.”

This is certainly an example of citizen investigative journalism in action, albeit encouraged by a newspaper and hopefully the negative impact will encourage openness from organisations.

I’m guessing the decision to go for an injunction was made by Trafigura’s legal rather than PR team. It is normally the favoured move by lawyers to restrict the flow of communication. However, once you try and get something banned, you immediately make it hot property and the press/internet users will become fixated on it, causing hysteria until the secret is revealed a la Barbara Stresiand.

As Keith Ashby, Head of Litigation at Sheridans put it: “If people get a whiff that publication of information has been injuncted in the print media, they are getting more canny about how to find the information on the internet.”

This also pays as a very important PR lesson – if you have bad news, it is probably best to be truthful and try and put it into context rather than block or hide your head in the sand. In crisis management it is always better to be honest, say ‘sorry’ and rebuild from there.

Lying, bullying and not being apologetic makes this even harder – which I’m sure Trafigura will find out to their cost.