Link bait and any price? Does it matter what we write when we produce online marketing for our clients?

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Permalink Reply by mazorj on May 18, 2008 at 1:07pm

Good grief. This is at least two or three levels below the old publicity ruse of faking a Hollywood starlet's kidnapping to boost her career. That was harmless in comparison. What price publicity? What's next, completely fabricated VNRs and PSAs gussied up to look like the real thing and distributed as legitimate PR offerings?

The most dismaying aspect of this is not that it happened - people make errors in judgment all the time - but that the perp apparently is unrepentant, insists there was nothing wrong with his act of fraud, and others apparently agree with him.

If there ever was a good argument for resurrecting the practice of public flogging, this one would get my vote.

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Permalink Reply by Leah McChesney on May 18, 2008 at 9:34pm

I think it is desperate nonsense.

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Permalink Reply by Jonathan Crossfield on May 19, 2008 at 12:12am

Certainly is desperate. After all, if marketing were as easy as making it all up, cynicism wouldn't be enough to protect the consumer and the internet's effectiveness as an information tool becomes zero.

We all know there's a lot of fake stuff on the internet already and you should always check your sources, but to actively adopt this as professional strategy raises it to a new level of risk.

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Permalink Reply by Mary Baum on May 19, 2008 at 3:35pm

I'll be surprised if the stunt doesn't in fact land the site in some trouble with the securities regulatory agencies in the UK. I doubt an American site could get away with a stunt like that - financial products are highly regulated, and there are real limits on what we can say and how we can promote them.

Just this morning I was in a meeting where a topic of discussion was a single word of copy describing the client's approach to investing: 'proven' is out; 'scientific' is in. The rules are looser when we're not directly describing the product, but I would think that publicly perpetrating any kind of hoax would raise more than a few eyebrows among the feds.

And as you pointed out in your blog, why a financial-services site would want to undermine the credibility of the rest of the information on its site is beyond me. How do you sell stuff when you've just in effect made it clear that you can't be trusted on any subject?

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Permalink Reply by Jonathan Crossfield on May 19, 2008 at 5:01pm

I'm not actually convinced that the marketer in question fully disclosed the technique he was using. "You want a funny story about a credit card to attract lots of links?" "Hell, yeah." But did he mention it was fabricated?

He continues to insist that the site won't be updated with a disclosure and that ethics don't come into this debate.

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Permalink Reply by Thom Kennon on May 20, 2008 at 6:11am

Hadn't heard of this myself, but would suggest that, although a hollow & deceitful hoax, it isn't link baiting.

Link baiting - as ugly as the name is - describes a practice that, when done right, is totally white hat and a great way to leverage quality - true! - content to drive visibility and traffic thru natural search.

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Permalink Reply by Dave Bricker on May 20, 2008 at 2:30pm

Too many people confuse "baiting" with marketing. There will always be clients whose business model is based purely on quantity than on any kind of quality, and there will always be "marketers" who make beautiful lies for those kinds of clients.

I don't mean to step on the premise of your worthwhile thread, but to expand the discussion a bit, I suggest that driving thousands of unqualified leads to a site through trickery may look good on a hit counter, but will do little to build the credibility or positive image of the people for whom the ruse was concocted.

For clients looking for "sawed-off shotgun marketing," the question of whether the campaign produced the hoped for .5% response rate may have some meaning. For professionals who have any real concern for either their clients' image or their own professional reputations, a simple affirmation that "we" do care what we write for "our" clients suggests that the answer can be found in our personal and professional concern for what happens to the other 95.5% of the pellets in the shotgun shell.

Ultimately, I prefer to think of myself as a member of a marketing community for which discussions of "link bait" are irrelevant to discussions of what "we write…for our clients." I suppose in a larger sense, every community has its whores, dealers and criminals. When it comes to marketers as a community in the larger sense, I'll choose to live in a gated neighborhood. That won't keep me from being exposed to the tacky campaigns of tacky promoters, but will allow me the comfort of not sharing an editorial "we" with them when I discuss what marketers will do for a few bucks.

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Permalink Reply by Jonathan Crossfield on May 23, 2008 at 10:04pm

money.co.uk have now apologised on their website, put up the necessary disclaimer and, according to the apology, severed connections with the SEO contractor responsible - the same contractor who has harped on all week about how successful he is and how clients are flocking to his door. Not a good look.

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