I was inspired to jot down my thoughts after reading Matt Churchill’s recent post ‘ Hiding Content Behind A Like’. As usual, it was a thought provoking post from my Edelman Digital colleague and he discussed how the New Yorker is forcing people to Like its Facebook page in order to gain full access to an article by Jonathan Franzen. Matt went on to argue this is not a ‘deeper level’ of engagement as claimed by the magazine, rather it is an endorsement.

I’ve thought about this and would say that it’s neither; how can you endorse or Like something before you have read it fully? Just because you read an article does it mean you like the publication? Instead it’s an attempt to game Facebook’s search algorithm; something I expect we’ll see increasingly as search engines begin to rank more highly content and pages that are shared and recommended through social networks.

Forcing people to Like a page in exchange for content is not quite the link farms, keyword stuffing or other black hat techniques we saw in the nineties and noughties, but it does raise some interesting ethical questions for the SEO and social media communities. I recognise that gaming search is as old as search itself, but for me this does not sit comfortably.

People may argue that hiding content behind a Like is the trade-off consumers make in order to consume content. For instance, email capture has long been exchanged for useful content, such as research reports and whitepapers, whilst ‘pay with a Tweet’ services’ have grown rapidly – so paying with a Like could appear as the natural extension of this.

The issue I have is that the New Yorker is clearly trying to generate an artificially high number of recommendations to improve visibility on Facebook and subsequently, Google et al. With search engines ranked as the first place people look for information, this is a dubious practice at best and bears more than a passing resemblance to astroturfing.

I fully appreciate magazines and newspapers are looking for ways to increase advertising revenues via web traffic from search, but this seems a short-sighted tactic. To increase web traffic, news sites should be creating content that people want to Like, not have to Like. It can be done. The Huffington Post for example, excels at producing excellent news coverage and content people are searching for. It’s a great stratgey that has increased both readership and revenues.

We’ve also seen the Daily Mail masterfully strike the balance between news, trending content and celebrity gossip to create a one of the worlds most popular news sites with over 3 million unique visitors per day.

Whilst I see hiding content behind a Like as a slightly unethical attempt to game Social Search before it’s properly begun, more generally I’m excited to see how recommendations from my social networks impacts upon my search results.

For those who want to find out more about search and how social is going to play a bigger role on results, check out this deck entitled ‘SEO is broken – giving way to social search’ and post by Speed Communication’s Stephen Waddington. Similarly, Steve Rubel and David Armano have written great posts on related topics.

I’ve also included an article, which although a couple of months old, only caught my attention this week. It looks at internships within the PR industry and my friend Mike White makes some great suggestions on how internships could be defined in the future. I’ll reiterate my position; I think it is unethical not pay expenses and that best practice should be the minimum wage – at least. The post has generated a fair amount of conversation, which is just what we need more of, if we are to find a more equitable solution.

Why Your Customers are Turning to Social Media
You may have noticed the way we communicate and engage with each other has changed. In no small part it is because of technology, though it’s less of a technology revolution and more of a communications evolution.

Whilst the article contained some interesting snippets of information, it left me with more questions than answers, namely:

1. Who should be teaching digital skills?
2. What digital skills do employers want?
3. How can people demonstrate digital skills?

I enlisted the help of industry colleagues Marshall Manson, Director of Digital Strategy at Edelman and Stephen Waddington, Managing Director at Speed Communications to share their thoughts on these questions.

Marshall said:
“1. In my experience, academics are good at teaching principles and lousy at teaching practicalities. So most of the training is going to have to be done by employers in a professional setting. Mostly though, PRs need to take the time to build experience. That’s what I’m always looking for nowadays.

2. Experience. Real depth. Understanding of how the platforms really work. And increasingly (especially at senior levels), real insight into how to build strategies and work with the platforms to undertake successful campaigns built on conversation. Also critical: Ability to listen to the conversation and discern insights.

3.Talk the talk. And back it with real examples.”

Stephen said:
1. The digital PR industry is too immature for formal teaching courses to have been developed. The rules have yet to be written. But there are plenty of good books and lots of materials online. And the tools are free are readily available for anyone to experiment.

2. If you’re new to PR you need to build your own social networks on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. And you need to develop content on a blog platform, Flickr and YouTube. Likewise if you’re in PR and want to stay in PR you equally need to learn how to use digital techniques to create and seed content.

3. It’s the old adage. Show me what you’ve done don’t tell me what you could do. Build out your own social networks and use a blog platform, Flickr or YouTube. I am constantly astonished at the number of PR and journalism students that aren’t sufficiently motivated to experiment with these new forms of media. I would always choose someone that had made the effort versus someone that had not.”

I’d like to put on record my thanks to both Marshall and Stephen for sparing the time to give their views on this issue. I’m sure any graduate looking to break into the PR industry in 2010 will find this a valuable post. On a personal note: I look forward to exploring this topic more closely in an article for Behind the Spin magazine.

It was a thoroughly enjoyable afternoon and both Charlotte Britton and Stephen Waddington have penned thoughtful blogs on the session.