The Village People

Before we published my story on Village Voice Media’s questionable partnership with social networking startup Likeme.net, I spent two days calling VVM ad staff, management—including the Seattle Weekly’s managing editor Mike Seely—and corporate honchos, trying to get an explanation as to why VVM was allowing—and apparently encouraging—advertising staff to write reviews for their business clients on Likeme.

Initially, no one was willing to go on record, although VVM did release a snarky statement about my piece (edited for length):

Village Voice Media would like to welcome our new public relations agency, Seattle’s Stranger, which will be announcing each of our new web initiatives at the top of its homepage. The first announcement was the introduction of VVM’s partnership with LikeMe.net.”

As with any business/PR firm relationship, the first press release might contain some errors. The Stranger stated that a majority of the recommendations were posted by VVM staffers. Majority would mean more than half. I wish we had 2500 employees! But alas, majority is not the case. As with any new web product you create or partner with, you give it to your friends and family to test drive. The Stranger is well aware of this, as they have seeded their own online comments and their personals section for years. Now VVM is launching the product to public. This is user generated content. Anyone can go log on and start entering their recommendations, uploading photos, and writing reviews, either positive or negative.

While VVM’s little swipe at us is cute—especially the part about us “seeding” our own comments, whatever that means—it completely fails to address the ethical problems with their cross-pollination with Likeme—posting reviews written by VVM ad staff without any sort of disclaimer—which was the crux of my story.

Since VVM didn’t seem interested in responding to my questions, I took another shot at contacting an ad staffer to talk about Likeme. This time, I managed to track one down.

The staffer I spoke with—who asked not to be identified—says he was never directed to write positive reviews for his clients. “I’m very active on Yelp and Facebook,” the staff member says. “My boss was like ‘hey, check [Likeme] out.’ They never told us to rate anybody. I have rated…clients. For me personally, if it’s on my Likeme profile, it’s actually because I like the place.”

A lot of people who commented on my story argued that VVMers should be allowed to recommend and review anything they choose. Fair enough. The problem is that there’s an appearance of a conflict of interest when ad staffers anonymously review companies that advertise in VVM papers on a web site partially owned by VVM… which VVM continues to fail to address.

I asked the VVM staffer if he knew why his company had formed a partnership with Likeme. “I think it was a way for them to get into the social media game,” he says. “As to their intentions, I really have no idea.”

Despite the ad rep’s defense of his company, VVM’s intentions seem pretty clear, especially in light of our shitty economy: butter up and retain advertisers by any means necessary.