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After reading an updated post on Debbie Weil’s blog this afternoon, and commenting with my thoughts on the fiasco, it reminded me of another issue regarding blog ethics, and more specifically whether or not asking friends and colleagues to visit and comment on a blog (your own, or a client’s) is an ethical public relations practice. Here’s what I have to say about that:

As someone heavily entangled in both online PR and Internet marketing, as well as the online business / webmaster game in my own right (running around 2 dozen blogs and sites), the issue of asking for blog comments doesn’t even register on the ethical spectrum. Why? Because there’s so much that’s worse, that honestly you can’t compete without being that proactive sometimes.

I can’t recall where the comment was made, but someone had made the statement that asking for visitors or comments is really just inflating the genuine interest in your blog – as a theory on why it’s unethical to ask.

That’s a load of BS. Here’s why:

There’s no such thing as a fair rating / ranking system in the blogosphere (or with any kind of website anymore). There is no honest measure of “genuine interest” in a blog right now, aside from your own stats, after you’ve weeded out the garbage. Internet marketers and SEOs use and abuse every tactic and tool created until they completely corrupt them… they’ve been doing it for ages (given, not all of them – I do know a few highly ethical SEOs).

They’ve destroyed any number of tools (in the sense of honest representations of popularity and interest), ranging from Digg to Alexa to general search engine rankings to more recently Squidoo, StumbleUpon and Technorati. Tools that used to gauge popularity and drive targeted traffic are now manipulated through the buying, selling, and trading of ratings, favorites, and even comments.

What this does is not only inflate the assumption of a blog’s popularity, but drives what I’d call “illegitimate” traffic to these blogs for the purpose of pumping up the numbers. Therefore, the interest in the blogosphere itself is completely hyped up, so even excellent interest levels from genuinely interested readers are often dwarfed by garbage from competitors using black hat tactics (something you hear about in SEO, but a lot of it’s really a PR game… why I called SEOs the “new spin doctors” in a recent post).

Like it or not, this is just the way the blogosphere works. So if people want something to complain about regarding blog ethics, lets put the blame where it belongs, and work together instead to find legitimate and ethical ways to put our blogs, and our clients’ blogs, on the map.

Blogging is a frustrating business and tool, because often much of the competition gets its traffic in unscrupulous ways, consisting of visitors who have no genuine interest in the blog, don’t stay more than a few seconds, and never return.

I think we need to put our focus as PR professionals on other reader metrics than things like traffic and what the rankings say- comments with a legitimate interest or feedback (what Debbie was trying to recruit), repeat visitors, views per visit, length of visits, etc. – the things that demonstrate that we’re putting the readers first, whether it’s soliciting feedback for improvements or just targeting markets that have a genuine interest in what the blog has to say. I also think it’s our job to help our clients, and well as perhaps the public, better understand these things to get the popularity war a bit more under control.

Frankly, lately being a member of the PR industry has me feeling like I’m back in high school…. I’d say it’s time to grow up, embrace these new technologies without having to personalize everything so we don’t feel left out (PR social media sites, social media press releases, blah, blah, blah), and get used to the fact that PR and various areas of marketing are now intimately connected and inseparable…. you’ve got Internet marketing people doing what we do, while we sit back and let them and clients still don’t know the difference. Old school PR is far from dead… the Web is just another medium, and we need to learn how to use it more effectively while getting the stars out of our eyes. Let’s start being more honest with ourselves and reality, and let’s start with blogging….