In an age where online netizens have the “attention span of a goldfish” (which is just a myth as noted by Derek Halpern), I am curious if other brand evangelists or social media managers would agree on this – channel seeding for social proof.

Seed followers, likes, views, +1′s. Gain trust in return. Show the needed proof that you are not just some fly-by-night snake oil merchant who’s just out to make some quick cash. How? Through social proof.

I was recently invited to a product demo from ClickingLabs, a company here in Cebu headed by JP Bisson. Diana Quartin, one of the co-founders and the design lead of the company forwarded an invitation for the demo. She was one of my classmates at the Certified ScrumMaster training and I was also curious to know how they used Scrum and agile development to create the two sites that they were launching – QuickSEOResults.com and BuyRealMarketing.com.

Should you use channel seeding? Is it okay to seed Twitter followers, Youtube views, Facebook likes? What do you think of web services offering this? You might be familiar of other contractors giving these services. There are lots of tools and sites out there that can help you with the numbers. It’s a numbers game, they say.

Personally, I am still weighing other options aside from seeding to give value to clients. I pride myself in using only organic means to gain followers. But if you have no social proof then it definitely means that you suck – promotion, content, website, messaging. There’s just something there that didn’t work. In my opinion, it should be remedied. The long-term goal is not to fool people with proof but to fix those problems and gain long-term benefits. The “numbers game” is just a short-term fix. I will be giving this a try because it makes sense for some clients – they definitely need the initial numbers.

Are you putting efforts into “proofing” your social channels? What do you think?