Anticipated Reciprocity Online – To The Limit of Ethics

When you have a blog or a website, where you post your latest work as a graphic designer, web designer, writer or other, you want to get some feedback on your posts. So, most of the people try to find ways to get their blog out there, to bring it some awareness. Blog and site owners mostly use social media, they create a page for their blog, a Twitter account, a LinkedIn account and so on and try to join as many groups as possible and to interact online. The reason is simple: participation increases the website’s visibility, image and reputation.

From what I’ve experienced, I think that there are 3 types of visitors to a blog or website:

1. Lurkers

This is also known as The Lurker Phenomenon. It’s a particular type of behavior that users have in online communication. It’s widely known that only a small part of users actually interact online – the other part, the majority (around 90%), are called passive observers or lurkers.

2. Altruistic Active Observers

These are the visitors that like to interact and to comment on other people’s blogs with no ulterior motive. I know it’s hard to believe, but there are people that actually do good deeds without wanting anything in return! The key word here is empathy – this enables us to share the emotions and partake in the actions of others as though we were experiencing them ourselves.

3. Active Observers with Expectations

Let’s take the example of Farmville, I think you’ve all heard about this interactive game on Facebook, where a lot of exchanging and helping takes place, but all the “good deeds” are done for profit.

There is a psychological theory called “anticipated reciprocity” which can be considered a more scientific (realistic or pessimistic) explanation of altruism. This theory states that people do good deeds in anticipation of receiving good deeds in return. So these people think that the bigger their good deed is, the bigger will be the good deed they will get in return.

Motivation is the most important factor when it comes to online interaction. It’s all about the level of involvement and the amount of benefits the visitors are expecting to get from interacting.

Examples of explicit and non explicit anticipated reciprocity

Say you are an online business of online vector goodies. You want to ensure a good customer experience and to improve satisfaction by giving away freebies, organizing killer giveaways, reducing prices, in anticipation that customers will buy your product and they might even bring some new customers on board. In this case, the reciprocity is not actually explicit.

In another example, let’s say that the company is offering benefits to visitors who provide useful feedback or who engage in meaningful conversations with the company. Now we’re talking about explicit reciprocity.

Comment exchange

The above examples are from the website owner point of view in order to example the theory of anticipated reciprocity. But the discussion here is “what is the interest of the visitor?”. I’ve learned that a lot of blog owners comment on other blog posts for at least 3 reasons: placing their website link in the comment will help them with SEO, they might receive some extra visitors from that comment, the owner of the other website might visit him back and leave him a comment.

I’m not going to be a hypocrite and say that I never experienced anticipated reciprocity. I also run a number of blogs, I write articles and I rate my articles by the number of visitors and comments they get. I thrive to make the blogs known and to make more people interact with me. It’s only natural – this is my job. Nevertheless, I also include myself in the first type of online visitors. I’m surfing cool websites all day and sometimes I run into something that absolutely blows my mind – that’s when I comment and let them know how I feel.

Now I want to tell you about a situation that got me thinking about explicit anticipated reciprocity and why it may be to the limit of ethics.

“Get comments”

The other days I was surfing my LinkedIN groups and I found a discussion on one of them called “Get comments”. I need to mention that this discussion had (by far) the most reactions with over 1700 (!) comments. Here is the idea of this discussion: a website owner had the suggestion that each member of the group posted the link to its blog and that everyone else commented on his latest post. In return, he had to visit all the blogs that commented on his and return the comments.

Needless to say this created a chain reaction situation and people got overwhelmed with comments, barely having time to get back on all those reactions. I think you all know what are the benefits of receiving some extra comments on your blog so this seemed like a great idea at the moment to many people. Including me.

In my case, I only visited the blogs in the fields I was interested in and I posted relevant comments on the latest posts, IF I FOUND THEM INTERESTING.

Looking at the comments placed by others on various blogs, I realized that people only gave good feedback and said only nice words, maybe thinking that if they say their honest opinion that person will not visit him back and leave him a comment. That’s when it got me thinking: is this thing really ethical?

I mean, the correct thing would be to do your best to create exceptional content and if you do so, then reactions will follow. I know you’ve noticed that almost every article has a call to action at the end like “Do you know any other examples?” or “What is your opinion on the matter?”. I think this is a legitimate request because if the visitor had the patience of going through your article (assuming he read the words and he didn’t only looked at the pictures and scrolled quickly to the end) and he found it interesting or useful then he might leave you a comment – and that comment has a good chance of being his honest opinion. Now that’s more valuable than 100 “forced” comments.

Someone compared this comment exchange situation with the following one and I found it funny so I thought of sharing it with you: imagine a family around a table, having dinner. The mother, who spent all day cooking, asks her family what do they think about the food she made for them. Of course, everyone says the food is delicious. Of course they say that, their mother asked them nicely. Moreover, if they said that it wasn’t good, they might not get any dinner the next day.

Your turn.

When do you think the thin line between ethical and non ethical is being crossed?