It's also a good idea for site publishers and marketers to spell out the benefits that members will enjoy from participating in a social ad, which could include special offers for relevant products.

However, as Facebook found out shortly after its big introduction of its social ads in November 2007, social ads can backfire in a big way if people find them intrusive, stealthy and confusing. This is what happened with the Beacon component of the Facebook social ads, and the company suffered a brutal privacy backlash.

While the IAB did a good job with this guidelines document, it remains to be seen whether enough social-network members will be willing to participate in social ads, even when publishers and marketers adopt all the recommended provisions, privacy safeguards and best practices, an analyst said.

"The jury is still out on whether consumers will participate in large scale with some of the ideas the IAB is promoting in its definition of social ads," Andrew Frank, a Gartner analyst, said. "You're asking consumers to go beyond their traditional roles of being passive observers [of ads] and instead participate in the advertising process, which isn't necessarily a natural or mass behavior at this point."