I’ve never believed this old adage – I think it’s an arrogant dismissal by incompetent marketers who can’t manage their public relations properly. Until recently it has never really been a big concern in the online world, but with an explosion of online communities over the past few years and the more recent increase in link baiting and brand protection services, perhaps online marketing professionals should be taking their branding more seriously?

If I could be bothered hunting down “how to” link bait articles, you’d see that most recommend undertaking some kind of negative efforts in order to spark off some link love to your site. A war with another blogger. A campaign against a well known brand. Posting inaccurate information to tempt righteous bloggers to correct you. Etc. I’m sure most people who read this blog have already seen such articles, so no need to rehash them here.

Let’s consider some examples.

A while back, Brett Tabke banned all bots from WebmasterWorld. While this wasn’t intended link bait as such (it had a technical justification), it did serve as link bait for WmW. Did they get more links and coverage? Yes. Did they suffer any negative impact? No.

They didn’t lose any traffic (that they didn’t want to get rid of). They didn’t lose any users over the experiment. The site and business hasn’t suffered from it – in fact, a lot of people had a little more respect for Brett & WmW at the time for having the balls to ditch all search traffic as an experiment.

While this isn’t a great example (it wasn’t an intentional link bait exercise), it does show how positive link bait can lead to positive results.

On the other hand, 2006 saw countless cases of companies screwing up their branding online by handling their online PR badly. While not all of these are because of stupid link baiting, the end results are the same. Perhaps the companies have received more exposure because of it, but what is the long term impact of this?

Zipatoni launched a splog for the Sony PSP and ended up getting slated by pretty much everyone over it. What’s worse is that their response was grossly inadequate for the scale of their screw up and ended up compounding their failure. Now search for “Zipatoni” and you find a great deal of negative results in the top 20.

Another example from 2006 is Big Mouth Media’s ban from Google. While this is an embarrassing slip up in itself (which was rectified pretty quickly), their response to critics in the SEO community was arrogant and badly presented and made the whole affair much worse for them when Matt Cutts told the SEO world that they were in fact penalised from Google (and it wasn’t a mistake as BMM claimed). Again, search for “Big Mouth Media” and you find negative results (this from a company that offers online brand protection services).

In both these examples it was entirely within the control of the companies to manage these negative situations properly, but in both cases they failed to do so and it resulted in much more negative publicity.

Was any publicity, good publicity in these cases?

Well, there is the SEO argument that says “yes”. After all, they did get a lot of link love from various sources so perhaps it will help them in the long term in terms of improved rankings and traffic. Notice I haven’t linked out to them just now – I’m not a link scrooge – I just do see any point in rewarding stupidity. If I thought for a second that these were well planned link bait campaigns and not simple screw ups I’d probably have more respect for them!

However, what happens when clients carry out due diligence before they sign up for services provided by these marketing agencies? While a Google search might not be the first thing they do, it is fairly likely it will be part of the research. Will a client want the services of an agency that has caused an international uproar for a major brand client or an agency that have themselves been unable to assure the service they are offering?

The overall impact is debatable and obviously there are many other factors in the client decision making process, but the point is do we really want to throw some negative factors into the mix?

Link baiting is a short term exercise that can potentially have long term positive results, but I think that all too often people neglect to consider the long term negative results as well.

Credit to those who do link bait well – it can be a useful tool, just as SEO can be. But as with SEO, many take the basic concepts and run with them without looking too deeply into the strategic implications they can have on their site, business or brand.

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Scott Boyd (aka Marketing Guy) is an Edinburgh based online marketing consultant with over 6 years experience in the industry. He is the founder of SEO agency eFlaunt, where he mixes a
blend of traditional marketing and SEO.

Scott’s musings relating to the marketing and SEO industries can be found on his blog – Fused Nation.

But only one extreme form of link building, called “linkbaiting” can reel in the big fish and attract industry-wide attention or land whale sized national media for massive linking on the scale site owners fantasize about. The Linkbaiting session at SES 2006 in San Jose offered bucket loads of link bait to hopeful link anglers.

Rand Fishkin (appropriate name for LinkBaiting) of SEOmoz.org was first of a panel of experienced link bait fishermen to present on the topic at the Search Engine Strategies 2006 show. Fishkin recently landed a shark with excellent bait offered at his site he named the “Page Strength Tool,” which helps webmasters determine the overall quality score, and can determine ranking factors for their web site beyond simple “PageRank.” The tool magically reviews dozens of factors contributing to high ranking of sites and reports to webmasters where they’re strong and what needs work.

http://www.seomoz.org/tools/page-strength.php

Fishkin started by outlining the elements that lead to success. Step one to link baiting is in researching a sector link “worthiness” by doing some discovery of “big” players in your field. Check del.icio.us tags and technorati tags on your topic. Can your web site content be tweaked to appeal to pundits in this field?

He suggested “online viral public relations” as another name for linkbaiting, since the “baiting” term seems to carry negative connotations. He recommends selecting a content focus to meld branding and viral elements and to do keyword research to find popular phrases in your area. Digg.com as well as del.icio.us offer “most popular” areas showing what is currently hot. Fishkin also recommends StumbleUpon.com as an undervalued resource to research areas of online buzz and interest. Look for elements that encourage linking.

Fishkin was followed by Cameron Olthuis of Advantage Consulting Services with a presentation titled, “Tracking your buzz – Because your reputation depends on it”

Olthuis emphasized how critical it is to monitor perceptions of buzz. Track your buzz using blog search engines and conversation tracking at popular message boards to follow public conversation about your site. Track the right terms to monitor how people perceive your buzz, Subscribe to RSS feeds using company name, company URL, competitors or industry related sites. He recommends that you figure out how best to leverage your buzz once it starts by watching what people say. If you have no knowledge of what is being said, the buzz you do gain could end up being nothing more than chumming for fish – You may attract them, but you’ll never catch them with out hooking them after they show up.

Join any conversations you do find by commenting on blogs, respond to emails and by posting in forums, answering questions, because it keeps your buzz going and can lead to many more links. If buzz is negative, be sure to turn it into good any way you can. Take focus off of negative buzz if it happens by creating a different controversy. ClaimID is a personal reputation management company he recommended using to track online buzz.

http://www.claimID.com

The Mentos & Diet Coke fountain video was discussed by Olthuis as an example of taking control of any buzz that starts spontaneously. For those unfamiliar with it, the video involves putting the candy into Diet Coke to create a fountain of soda. (Fizz in this case, rather than buzz). Mentos took advantage or the buzz created by the video phenom and funneled the traffic to a newly created contest to “Create your own Mentos Fountain.” The most popular video, linked to by the home page of the Mentos web site, has been viewed over 6 million times. The Mentos site is at:

http://us.mentos.com

The video can be viewed at: http://www.eepybird.com/

Embrace your buzz, regardless of good, bad or ugly. Measure it with backlinks, brand image, trends, new customers by using Yahoo Site Explorer, blog search engines Google Trends, Opinmind and Google Analytics. Boggs wrapped up with the quip “Learn rinse, repeat.”

The next presentation was by Jennifer Laycock, editor of SearchEngineGuide. Her advice is “Give them something to Talk About” Why use link baiting and viral marketing? The cost is the in the idea, not the marketing. Any idea won’t do, must be something worth talking about. Once you get that idea, there is almost no cost involved. The technique creates brand evangelists and gives people a reason to talk about your product. Because it is driven by passion, it creates a better conversion at a rapid response rate.

She gave the example of the “Subservient Chicken” game on the web site from Burger King – did it sell any chicken? She emphatically claims that it is “Not about selling chicken, it’s about branding and awareness.” She observed that it had resulted in hundreds of millions of visits, with an average time on the site of over 7 minutes – unheard of for most web pages. Laycock says it was about “making a brand cool.” She asserts that this video resulted in a new demographic of web savvy, mostly young visitors becoming newly interested in Burger King.

Lack of Brand Control is an issue she suggests is on the down side of viral marketing. Laycock warns that there is no control over who gets your message or how it is sent. Unbridled growth of a viral message and complete lack of contol over how quickly or even where you grow. The popularity is often hard to measure.

Laycock gave tips for creating the idea by suggesting that you ask yourself, “What sparks passion in my customers? What hasn’t been done before? How will your idea benefit your users? Will your audience risk their own reputation on it? Ideas spread because they are important to the spreader not the originator. A good viral marketing idea is one that builds and works through relationships.

She emphasized that the point of linkbaiting is to “attract eyeballs.” Successful link bait makes it easy to spread the word by providing tools or simple methods of sharing. This is one key to the success of videos that can be linked through YouTube.

Laycock recommends scalability be considered before launching and that you must be poised to act if things take off. She urges that it is critical to get beyond the idea itself to exploit motivators. She insists that “people want to be cool, so give them the chance” to do that with your link bait.

She gave the example of Gmail invites as one great method of allowing early existing Gmail users to be cool, by having the ability to invite their friends to the service (when it was by invitation only) via a simple link in the mail interface. She proposes that linkbaiters “use existing networks and take advantage of other peoples resources.”

Laycock had her own success in lainkbaiting through a fundraising site she began called “Lactivist,” which was intended to raise money for a (mother’s) “Milk Bank” by selling t-shirts and seeking donations to support breastfeeding instead of feeding formula to newborn babies.

http://www.Lactivist.com

She used that site to next emphasize that “People are Talking and Linking” so that we need to pay attention to the impact of blogs. She recommends that everyone doing linkbaiting should “Understand the Impact of a good Post.” and just as importantly, “Understand the impact of a Bad Post.” She suggests that the way to “get people to do what you want is by arousing their desires.”

People wanted to participate in the series and spread the word about Lactivist (Short for “Lactation Activist”). She emphasized the importance of being intersted in others, learning their names, visiting their sites and doing active link building.

Did the linkbaiting for Lactivisit work? Laycock claimed the site produced $2500 in profit and $1000 in donations for the Milk Bank. More than 1,000 incoming links make up 75% of the traffic to the site. Total unique visitors 36,500 in a very short period. She says the project also produced a SearchEngineGuide ebook for promotional purposes.

The final presentation was titled, “Gaining Visibility in the Golden Age of Links”. Given by Chris Boggs of G3Group. He recommended what he called “Linkbaiting in a search engine friendly fashion” by contacting bloggers specific to your industry.

He said, “You can’t just put the worm on the hook, you have to throw the hook out and do link building first,” because link baiting has become the holy grail of search marketing. Many hooks are baited, but are cast in shallow waters without big fish to notice or take the bait. You can’t catch a marlin with worms cast on wimpy hooks bobbing into a back country pond.

He noted a bad example of reputation issues created by links gained from negative publicity, pointing to the Comcast customer service fuss by a blogger that had bad experience waiting for Comcast service rep to show up and then caught him sleeping on video during the visit. That bad PR has the video complainer ranked at number 5 in a google search for “Comcast customer service”.

Boggs spent much of his presentation giving a long list of link baiting site examples from past few months. Notable among them was the “Church of the flying spaghetti monster” and the Air Force One graffitti story (a faked creation that imitated the presidential plane with graffiti spray painted across the wing mounted engine, supposedly done at Andrews Air Force Base.)

Flying Spaghetti Monster: http://www.venganza.org/

Air Force One Graffiti: http://www.stillfree.com/

Each of the examples given in this story produced extreme amounts of controversy or publicity and gained mainstream press coverage. Those sites that successfully create link bait are those that produce positive buzz and lead to massive linking and great PR for sites that do it well. Each of the speakers gave great advice regarding link bait development that, if followed, may lead to landing the big fish of national media attention and many thousands of links with just a big idea and not necessarily big budgets.

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Mike Banks Valentine operates SEOptimism, Offering SEO training of
in-house content managers http://seoptimism.com/SEO_Staff_Training.htm
as well as the Small Business Ecommerce Tutorial at
http://WebSite101.com and blogs about SEO at http://RealitySEO.com
where this article appears with live links to SMO stories, buttons, blog posts and examples.