MediaVision Blog : Search Engine Marketing

So an online marketer makes up a story about a kid who hires prostitutes to play games and eat Oreos in a motel room. He writes it in a reportage style and includes witnesses, comments from motel staff and real locations. The story goes wild on Digg, appears on Fox News, on YouTube and in newspapers. After chinking champagne flutes, the author (Lyndon Antcliff) announces that the story was fabricated for a client who is in no way connected with comedy, journalism, children’s rights or sex work. And the world cries foul.

This debacle raises some interesting concerns about the connection between linkbait and news. From the start, it’s easy to see what the ethics are, because they generally apply to the rest of life: don’t lie, don’t mislead people for commercial gain, and don’t shirk the blame if it belongs to you. The guy who wrote about this mythical teenager placed his reputation on the line (“Not everything I write is fake!” he cried afterwards), and his client was also seen by the world’s inconstant eye as a shady marketer who supported stories about wicked teens who stole credit cards and hired hookers. How will you remember that author’s name now? Can you remember what industry his client was in?

In the aftermath of the storm, Antcliff published a post entitled “Mental Linkbait” on his blog, where he offered a forum for discussion on his linkbait tactic, and described how he went about his deception in order to hit the front page social media jackpot. Every social media marketer dreams of this. Every online marketer slobbers when offered proven tactics for garnering links. It’s not hard to be tempted into creating a sensationalist post to win this game. In this case, however, he received such flak from the online community that he took the offending post down, and is now offering a “subscription only coaching program for linkbaiters”.

Very simply, a journalist holds a responsibility to offer the truth as objectively as she sees it (yes, “objective” is a hazy concept, but it stands), because if she didn’t, we wouldn’t want to read her work. A marketer holds a responsibility, to some extent, to be transparent about his motives. He can’t leap across the boundary and play in the journalists’ field. Neither can the journalist be influenced by anything other than the facts (although we’re all familiar with ‘the perks of journalism’). Luckily, the internet is its own filter, and when marketers and journalists lie, they get caught. Of course, we expect a marketer to lie more easily than a journalist, although in this case it’s the other way around. We’re all chasing that elusive front page, but there’s a price to pay for cheating your way there.

P.S. The client later apologised (after only three weeks of the world’s undivided attention, what’s everyone complaining about?).