I think the pros outweigh the cons here. At the end of the day, no one is doing anything particularly wrong. The applicants obviously trust Flightster as a brand (or they would want to write for them), and Flightster are offering a relatively good opportunity.

It’s better than say, a travel publisher who charges an entry fee to a travel writing competition.

I’m an ardent critic of SEO manipulation, and I am struggling to see how you can tackle Flightster about this, especially when you sell paid text links to your own blog; which is a far worse, and wholly unethical online practise, in my opinion.

This is only my opinion, I’m neither an applicant for Flightster nor have I ever had any dealings with them. I just found them through a blog post on someone else’s blog.

Here’s the link
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxIjTjZlWHM

And while it is a little self-promotional I hope anyone that loves travel enjoys it too

Anyway, I’m attempting to Tweet this from China where the Great Firewall of China makes Twitter more difficult to get onto than watching the SAW movies with your eyes open all the way through… China + Using Social Media to Add to the Conversation = NO.

Anyway, have fun reading through everyone’s entries and thanks for the opportunity Siri, “See” you online.

will try to join and will re-post this so all my travel blogger friends will know this!

thanks!

I just feel very strongly about all social media engagements being win win as far as possible and to me this smacks of exploiting the mad scramble to earn money travel blogging. You hold up an enticing carrot and create all this buzz without much reciprocity.

However you could argue that what you’re doing makes good business sense. After all it’s only my point of view and at least you were willing to publish my comments.

Thanks for your comments and critiques. We’re not going to deny that we were eager to get SEO benefit out the hiring process. But subscribing the blog and tweeting the post were the only two required parts of this. WE encouraged people to subscribe and become a fan on Facebook. We also will be doing a roundup post for all the people who enter and link back to them. As far as their names not being linked, that’s noted and I’ll talk to our development team about adding that into the comments field. We’d also be open to more suggestions on how to make it more win-win as this is the first of the social media campaigns we’ve run and plan to have several others in the future.