Back when I owned an antique and second-hand furniture business I would put various pieces of furniture out the front of the shop on the footpath so the passing main road traffic would see it (and hopefully would drop in to buy). Without measuring the results I had no way of telling if it worked well, not so well, or not at all.

So I went down to a local post-Christmas auction and purchased a 7 foot high stuffed Christmas elf. You could not help but see this thing. It had those funky stripey tights, green pointy shoes and hat with bells on, and it was HUGE.

Each day I would arrange the elf in some pose on the furniture out the front. One day he would be relaxing in an old oak rocking chair, another reclining on a beautiful brass bed, and well he did spend a day sitting on a 200 year old commode, but let’s not dwell too much on that. Still I had no idea whether my attention grabbing elf was actually working as a sales tool.

Until one terrible day when a car pulled up out the front of the shop, a couple of masked guys jumped out and bundled the elf into the car and drove off. My first thought was “Sheesh people will steal anything these days”, and my second thought was “I want my elf back”.

There was no point going to the police, the elf had cost about $50 and I wasn’t going to waste their time with trivialities. I wracked my mind, what could I do… posters on poles? Signs in windows? I couldn’t really spend the time away from the shop and it seemed a lot of effort. So I drafted a press release and faxed it to my local newspaper.

It read

For immediate release:
Have You Seen Elfis?

Elfis the 7ft high Christmas elf that can usually be seen in front of the Absolutely Fabulous Antiques shop in the main street has been kidnapped….

I went on to describe the events and thought that if anything it would be some free publicity even if I did not get the elf back (oh the Elfis name came to me at the spur of the moment, it really had not had a name up until then). Without meaning to, I opened a floodgate of publicity with one fax.

A few hours later I was being interviewed on local radio, calls started coming in from news wire services. I got a call from Reuters! The story went round the globe (and this was before the internet was big, so this was a HUGE thing) . I got a call from an Irish newspaper asking me if the elf was made of concrete!

The story had an enormous effect, I had people call me who said they had seen the elf after it was stolen. A security guard said he had followed a car with a giant elf in it two days after the kidnapping, others rang to see whether he had been found.

About a week after the event I was pretty much sure that the elf was gone for good when I took a call from a middle-aged man. He sounded painfully embarrassed, but he had the elf and wanted to return it. I was happy to have the elf back and asked him to drop it round.

Long story short, his university student son and friends had thought the prank of stealing the elf would be fun, but they had not thought about the consequences or really about what to DO with a 7ft giant elf when you have it. Giant elves are pretty hard to hide. So Dad returned the elf and I hope the son copped a good allowance cutting off.

Did I let it rest there? Well no I sent another press release announcing his return. Photos of the joyful reunion between me and Elfis were taken and the papers had another good news story.

So what has this got to do with modern internet site link-baiting? Everything!

The current rash of link-baiting gets stuck somewhere up my left nostril. By link-baiting I mean the concocted stories that draw attention like flies to a piece of manure, not the top 10 lists or other common type of posting. It’s not the fact that people are clever with their stories (though the current Big Foot one is a stinker), or that it usually attracts people to rubber neck like so many mouth breathers. It is the fact that every link bait story takes a little bit of the mojo of the internet away.

I love the fact I can get information that is interesting, challenging and straight from the horses mouth. I like that I DON’T have to cynically doubt every single story as fiction as soon as I read it. I liked being able to browse on the internet and actually find right answers for what I wanted to know.

Notice the change in tense there from like to liked? Like Tinkerbell, if I don’t believe in the internet, it will die.

/rant

I am sure if you have read this far you will be thinking “Time to grow up Allison, everything changes”. Yep I agree, and I am sure that I too will use some form of link-baiting in the future, I’ll try and make sure though that it isn’t worthless crap and doesn’t leave me or the reader with a bad taste in my mouth.

Link-baiting is not to create long term traffic on the back of the story, it is used to bump an unknown website up through its competitors search engine listings by having many sites link to it.  It does not create value. It does not even help your brand (example read Made To Stick about the Pink drum playing rabbit).  It won’t create sales unless there is a coincidence that the undirected traffic is impulsively buying, or they wanted it already, which means your marketing sucks in the first place. It is a means to an ends, at the detriment of our beliefs.

*but it still works