Copy Brighter

I knew that the Digg user experience was sure to deteriorate when they agreed to let Microsoft serve their graphical ads, but I didn't know they'd allow advertisers to try and foist this type of deceptive blinking schlock on a relatively tech-savvy community:

I was really hoping this was some kind of joke. But sadly, it very clearly states that "This is not a joke." And it seems to run contrary to the spirit of Kevin Rose's promise:

It’s important to say that we’re as focused as ever on a great user experience. So, no dancing monkey ads, and the design will remain uncluttered.

Diggers used to love some of the ads on the site (e.g., Snorg Tees girls) and mention them frequently in the comments. Reddit is doing a little bit better at targeting their audience, and the community speaks up and gives feedback on the insulting ads. Diggers should do this too.

And advertising execs should know that deceptive, blinking "Free Laptop: Must Complete 6 Offers" banners erode social media users' confidence in a site's advertising much more than any short-term profit it could bring them.

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Once of the drawbacks of being a social media power user is that everything moves way too fast. You've got so many amazing stories streaming your way that you barely have time to read and enjoy them. Instead, you're forced to woof it all down: rush to vote on friends' picks and hustle to submit your Google News / RSS finds before someone else beats you to it. You're lucky if you get to partially scan most of it. Making "permanent" bookmarks in your browser can get messy, so the good people at Idea Shower have created Read It Later, a temporary bookmarking plugin for FireFox. When you see a story that you want to get back to later on, just right click on the link and select "Read This Link Later." The story then gets stashed in a convenient browser button for you to peruse later on. It also contains a feature for submitting and bookmarking your best finds to other social sites. Good stuff!

A Wicked Social Buzz

I haven't been in the search marketing business for that long, but I'm definitely gravitating towards social media.

I find that creating content and participating in social web is significantly more stimulating than... say... making XML sitemaps, geeking out infront of WordTracker, or crafting copy with judicious use of the phrase "Alabama tax lien attorney." Watching the links, comments and votes pour in after a social campaign is up there with hitting a home run or the jackpot in Vegas. It triggers strong emotions and a massive rush of endorphins.

The buzz of brainstorming a massive social campaign and watching it spread is much stronger than watching the rankings incrementally improve during a manual link building campaign... it's a much bigger bang than modest pleasure of crafting a clever 301 redirect...

But Is It Sustainable?

Naturally, I'd love to make social media the main focus of my workday. But as a Capricorn, and I'm way too practical to just follow my bliss without any kind of business plan. As I think about how to take my social media skills to the next level, here's a few concerns that come to mind:

1. The ethics of SMM are blurry.

Is it OK to make a second account? Ask friends for votes? Buy votes or automate them? Write fake reviews? Recycle content? Bury the competition?

I generally try to swing straight, organic, white-hat and transparent-ish (I don't want anything coming back to haunt me)... but I'm aware that the pressures of client expectations and making profits (a.k.a. stayin' alive) can really stretch people's morals and ethics. And if you think Digg and Stumble are competitive now (in the absolute infancy of the genre) it's only going to get harder. 2007 is to social media what 1996 was to SEO.

Will we see teams of professional voters and commenters? Rampant payola and Multi-Level Voting (MLV)? Online reputation extortionists and protection rackets? Social media username and brand squatting ("MrBabyMan" is already registered. Please choose another name.')? Account brokers? Officially sponsored story submissions ("$2999 for express home page submission, subject to editorial review")?

2. SEO is steady. SMM is volatile.

Just about any website can be helped out by solid SEO. Search algorithms are mechanical and more "impartial". In contrast, social media success depends entirely on the tastes, opinions and politics of people - and their feelings at the moment. Some brands are loved as "way cool" and others are poo-poo'ed as pariahs (i.e., Mircosoft's Zune's "Welcome to the Social" campaign ). You can give things your best spin, but ultimately you have no control over the outcome. The audience decides... and they'll either get a kick out of your story, or they'll kick the snot out of it. And if the sysadmins decide there's anything fishy about your account or voting history... GAME OVER.

3. Social media marketing can be hard on the nerves. The highs are spectacular, but the lows really suck. Every time the sever goes down from a traffic spike, the mob revolts and smashes you and your content with seditious smacktalk, and the burry brigade starts taunting you with libelous comments... it's enough to trigger a heart attack. Especially if weeks of hard work have gone into a project and an expectant client is sitting there, biting their nails right along with with you. I've gotten myself so worked up over social media campaigns that I needed crack open a beer at the end of the day to calm my nerves. I don't want to end up actually ordering that Xanax and Tramadol stuff that always shows up in the comment spam.

4. So many sites, so many profiles, so little time. Technology is a harsh mistress. The only thing my iPhone did for my life was seduce me into spending 15 hours a day online, rather than just 10 or 12. Nowadays, I find myself checking on my Reddit stories while hiking (!).

It's getting harder to find original content that hasn't been submitted already. More time consuming to post it to all the sites that are popping up, keep up with what is going on, AND find time to update 5 different blogs.

Some people have referred to social media promotion as "the new link building" because it's so massive and overwhelming a task. New social media account consolidator sites like Fuser are trying to make access to your Facebook and MySpace-type accounts available in one place, but the social landscape and user base are growing faster than tools and widgets designed to keep up with it. Sooner or later... we'll have to adopt 30 hour days in order to get it all done.

Social Media Career Ideas

I think that becoming a social media professional is possible and sustainable. But it hasn't yet evolved into recognized business marketing role yet... so we'll have to take define this emerging profession and market ourselves aggressively.

Here's a few ideas on how you can start to do that:

• Become an expert a seeding and growing online social communities for corporate or non-profit sites. Many well-funded companies are throwing up massive web infrastructure, but they don't have a clue how to kick things off socially. You can use the same interaction skills you've sharpened on forums, blogs and Facebook... where there is a growing, commercial market for it.

• Work with startups. Here in Boulder, there are tons of tech startup companies with venture capital and solid developer talent. What they seem to be lacking, in most cases, is someone with serious social networking influence and viral skills to make their concept popular. They spend $2,000,000 developing and launching a site. For promotion, they send out a couple of electronic press releases and do a half-baked Blogspot site. Then... while woefully carrying the desks out of the office, they wonder why their site never "caught on."

• Seek cool brands that could be leveraging social media, but aren't. (Think: surfing companies, solar technology, DRM-free audio downloads.) Offer to help them out, and show them how they could benefit by participating in the social web. It's probably on the back of their minds already, but they don't even know what – or who – to ask. You might literally be the answer to their prayers.

• Try pitching some traditional PR firms (if you've got boatloads of patience and professional tact). Work for them and help them understand how the Web is changing the world of communications. Help them realize these are no longer the days of pompous-sounding press releases and licking stamps. Teach them how to make "social media relations" a part of what they do.

What Do You Think?

If you've read down this far, you're also probably pretty excited about social media. I'd love to get your take on things: Do you think social media marketing can be a viable business and career?

What kind of issues, problems and potentials do you see with it?

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Recently the Digg interface got an extreme makeover. There are now more social features on the site, like photo albums and public "shout" messages. And the new system has been designed to make reciprocal voting on friends' stories far less convenient. Instead of blasting down a list of your friends' submissions ("Digg! Digg! Digg! Digg!")... Uzi style... it now takes some real mouse-clickin' effort. It takes so much patience that some people are submitting less, and others are ditching personal politics and "friends of convenience" and only voting on stories that they actually like. While many of the hardcore Diggers complained that the site is ruined, I think the changes are probably making the site fairer and more accessible for the average user. And I think it has (marginally) improved the diversity and quality of the content that hits the home page. The interface changes make it far more time consuming to maintain a Digg power account. Before you could maintain relationships with people by checking in once a day and spending 10 or 20 minutes on the site. Now it takes more like 30 to 90 minutes a day just to vote on friends' stories, and you need to check in two or three times a day because you can only see three pages of your friends' recent submissions. Thankfully, there's a way Digg through your friends' submissions much quicker. If you've got a Mac, the Dugg widget for your dashboard is highly recommended.

Just hit the F12 key, and click on the tiny "i" in the upper right corner of the widget. For the "Digg Topic" select "friends' submitted" and put your username in below:

Click "Done" and then you can see a list of your friends' stories. Click on them and it will open up the story in your Web browser (in tabs) All it takes to Digg a story is a quick: F12 + Click-Click rather than: Opening up a browser, going to Digg.com, (maybe) logging in, clicking "Friends' Activity," clicking "Submissions," then click the story, then click to Digg it, then click the back button. I personally find the Dugg widget really makes voting quicker and more enjoyable. You can check in on your stories and your friends' stories several times a day with minimal effort. The only downside it is gets kind of "messy" by opening dozens of browser tabs while Digging a long list of stories...

Social media sites offer a wellspring of fresh, interesting content because they allow human users to vote on stories. In some ways social media is less susceptible to manipulation than traditional search engine algorithms, which mechanically look at signals like keywords and links to estimate quality and relevance.

The dark side of this human editorial touch is that it can enable small "gangs" of users to control the top stories and effectively squash content on topics they don't like.

The Digg Bury Brigade

On Digg, people normally "digg" stories that they like. There is a "bury" button tucked below the description that allows people to vote against a story.

Once you bury a a story, it becomes faded and translucent on your screen:

The "Bury Brigade" is a theoretical, unorganized mob of trigger-happy Diggers who take pleasure in stomping on any content that goes against their personal politics or tastes. They are notorious for burying commercially-oriented stories, SEO-related pieces, or self-submissions from people trying to use Digg as a marketing tool (without enough panache to fool the them into falling blindly for it).

Often they will mark a story with a comment like "Buried as lame" to incite others to do the same:

Any user can bury a story for any reason, but it takes many buries to kill a story. Once a story gets on the home page, it becomes very visible so some get buried within minutes or an hour. Once a story is buried, it is permanently erased from the home page and users have to go into the search function to find it. It can be heartbreaking to see great content get sacked because a vocal minority of critics disliked it - but it happens.

How many buries does it take to kill a Digg story? No one except the Digg engineers know the formula exactly. If a story provokes the "bury" reflex in enough people, and the swarm of Diggs isn't strong enough to overpower it, it will disappear from the home page. It also appears that the Digg staff moderates and manually buries some stories.

Here you can find a list of the buried stories that got kicked off Digg today.

If you look through this list of buried stories, you'll find:

• fake stories and pics, iffy rumors, and misleading headlines
• recycled content from Reddit and Del.icio.us that is old news to the linkerati
• commercial, video game-related marketing "stories"
• dumb, lowbrow pics and videos
• crude inside jokes that were dugg by a group of friends
• good content that was too revealing, opinionated or a "spoiler"
• explicit information on piracy, warez or illegal activities

While buries are deathly feared by linkbaiters and viral marketers, it's important to note that the Bury Brigade can sometimes serve as respectable vigilantes who keep Digg from getting overrun by commercial garbage.

Avoid the wrath of the Bury Brigade by submitting great content with accurate headlines, and take all possible steps to make your story appear legitimate, professional and non-promotional. Submit from a trusted account, and set-up a mini site on a new domain to host linkbait if your main URL is tarnished or unsuitable.

The Reddit Downmod Squad

On Reddit users "upmod" stories they like with an up arrow, and "downmod" ones they dislike with the down arrow.

The Reddit "Downmod Squad" is particularly vicious. Whereas Digg users tend to only vote down stories they particularly dislike or find offensive, Redditors downmod and pop stories like bubble wrap. The frequent downmodding is partially due to the way the user interface was designed (downmodding is just as visible as upmodding), and it's partially due to the passions and politics of the crowd that currently controls the site.

All day long, and particularly during the weekdays, there seems to be virtual posse of Redditors who ride the "New" section and downmod all stories - except for the ones that strongly appeal to them.. The Downmod Squad works the home page ("Hot") and the upcoming page ("New") like a game of checkers - voting up everything they like and stomping on everything else. Trying to get some upward traction for a story that falls outside their favorite topics is like swimming against a vicious riptide.

Members of the Downmod Squad frequently vote down content based on the title alone, without even looking at (or, God forbid, reading) the story.

What kind of content survives on Reddit?

At the time of this writing, Reddit is afflicted by a unique form of bipolar schizophrenic myopia. It's held in place by a peculiar dichotomy of users:

1. a strong faction of liberal pessimists and political whistleblowers.
2. a mass of happy-go-lucky, lowbrow [pic] and [comic] loving YouTube transplants

Don't believe me? Here's from the top 30 stories on Reddit today:

And here's a sampler of some recent "hee haw" stories:

The YouTube refugees will upmod anything amusing that takes very little mental effort to enjoy (i.e., not the rich, thought-provoking articles that Reddit was once famous for).

The extreme political faction tends to stomp on anything not related to political scandal, police brutality, corporate conspiracy, atheism or agnosticism, prison, legal irony, foreign policy disaster or global doomsday prophecy – regardless of the quality or subject matter.

Their motto: "If it doesn't confirm my views about how horribly messed up this country has become, it's out of here."

How can you get your content past the Downmod Squad?

If you submit during the busy weekday, you need to craft your headline as to to not stick out and and draw the wrath of either camp. And some people undoubtedly ask couple of friends to give it a little bump of votes so it can be visible long enough for more moderate users to vote on it. (This never used to be necessary - all it took was a great story and magnetic headline and you'd fly - but the climate is growing more ruthless and intolerant by the day.)

An even better strategy is to submit on late nights or on the weekends when the site moves slower and things have more of a chance to gain traction.

The downside to off-peak submission is that your content will only been seen by a fraction of the people who would see it on the busier weekdays. My experiments reveal that a mildly-popular (say, peaking at #12 in "Hot") story that spent several hours on the front page of Reddit on the weekend day will send between 4,000 to 6,000 unique visitors, and leave you with a handful of mid-to-low-quality backlinks.

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You find a great story. You submit it to Digg, cross your fingers and hope for the best.

But when you check on it the next day, you are disappointed to find that it only got 3 Diggs.

The Secret of Digg

New users often wonder how some people manage to get hundreds and thousands of diggs, day after day.

It's simple: top Digg users have established social networks of friends on the site who vote on their stories.

You can build a strong Digg network, too... without gaming the system or begging people for votes. This article will explain how you can organically develop a network of friends who will help you and exponentially increase your chance of hitting the Digg home page.

All it takes is about 30 minutes a day and a desire to digg lots of interesting stories.

Getting Started

After you've signed up for a Digg account, you need to learn your way around. Spend a couple of days just playing and exploring the site. Digg stories that interest you, and take a close look at the submitter's profile and statistics.

Does this person digg a lot of stories? Submit a lot of stories? Do they have a lot of friends? Do their stories get made popular?

Before you try to make friends, you need to spruce up your own personal profile first. Click on the "profile" selection at the very top center of your screen.

First, upload an icon. If you don't have a picture, you are a complete nobody on Digg. Your icon is one of the few things that will make you stand out and help people to remember you - so be creative. The display size is small so keep it simple and 100kb or less.

Then, at the top left of the screen, select "Manage Profiles" or "EDIT."

Make sure your name, location and IM username are entered. Adding a link back to your personal blog or website will give your profile a lot of credibility. Once your profile is completely filled out, you are already way ahead of about 90% of the Digg population.

Next, go learn about the different news categories. Digg is a tech-focused news site, so there isn't a category for every kind of story. Get familiar with the upcoming stories sections, where new stories germinate before some of them are "made popular" and voted onto the home page. Practice searching and sortng through the results (by most diggs, most commented, cloudview, etc.)

Building Up Your Network

Making friends on Digg is a bit oblique; the personalities behind the tiny icons may seem elusive, inaccessible or downright weird at first. Unlike MySpace or Facebook, there's no easy way to contact people, browse their photo albums or break the ice first. You mostly look at a user's statistics, and then scrutinize what kind of stories they Digg and submit and then form your opinion from there.

You can instantly add anybody as a friend, even site founder Kevin Rose or the #1 digger Mr. BabyMan. Once you've added a friend, it means that you can see their story submissions and diggs easily and vote on them, too. But adding a friend won't directly help your content on the home page. You need a two-way, reciprocal friendship. You want people to add you as a friend so they can see your stories.

You don't want just any Digg user to befriend you, either. 99 out of 100 Diggers don't participate much and are worthless for helping promote your content. You're on the lookout for active and savvy diggers, like yourself.

Beware: many of the Top 100 Diggers are slammed – some spend 15 hours a day hustling RSS feeds and digging a massive stack of stories – so they are less likely to pay attention to a new user like you.

A Hardcore Digg User's Stats:

Look for someone moderately active who seems likely to enjoy and digg your content. Their stats, their friends list, and previously submitted stories will gives you clues about whether you should make the effort to hook up with them.

An ideal Digg friend:

• Checks in and uses the site daily
• Diggs a lot of stories
• Checks for stories that their friends submit and diggs them regularly
• Submits stories that you will enjoy following and voting on
• Doesn't submit way too many stories
• Doesn't have 50 zillion friends

A More "Approachable" Digg User's Profile Stats:

A good place to make new friends is on the upcoming section of the news categories that interest you most. Click on "Upcoming Stories," sort them by "Most Diggs" and see if there are any stories that interest you. If it's a cool story and interesting description, then most likely a cool person submitted it. Scope out their profile and if they fit most of the above criteria, try adding them as a friend.

Follow and Digg Your Friends' Stories - Every Day

After you've added a few active Digg friends, then you need to start digging their content . Click on your profile (1), then on the friends tab (2) and then submitted (3).

Or if you are on the home page, you can just click the "Friends' Activity in 48 Hours" panel:

Now you'll see a list of the stories that your friends submitted. Check in at least once a day and digg ALL your friends' good stories. Go all the way down the list and don't leave anyone out. (If you don't like their taste in stories, you need to to pick a more compatible friend... just like in real life.)

After a while, the active users will notice that you're voting on their stories. And soon enough some of them will surely befriend you, and start to Digg your stories, too.

More Tips on Building a Powerful Digg Network:

• More friends is not necessarily better. The more friends you have, the more votes it will take for your story to hit the home page. Better to have 20 active friends than 400 deadbeats.

• Digg has a feature that will try to block you from adding friends too quickly. To get around it, just Digg about 10 or 20 stories, and then go back and see if it will let you add another friend. Digging stories is seen as a natural activity pattern that can reset the limit.

• Frequently check the "See Who Befriended You" section of your friends list. Look closely on the profiles of the people who have added you as a friend. If they look like a legitimate (i.e., not an icon of a hot babe with an account created yesterday) active user, try adding them and see if they start to digg your stories. If they don't, you can always dump them in a few weeks.

• Prune your friends list every few months. Get rid of deadbeats who aren't socially interacting with you or following your content. Search for new people who will take an interest in digging your stories. You can find out who diggs your stories by looking at "Who Dugg or Blogged This?" button at the bottom of your story descriptions. Better yet, use this tool to find out who is digging your stories. Check them out and see if you'd want to befriend them.

• Get the right people to notice you by leaving sincere, intelligent, personal comments on their stories. If their story doesn't make the home page, they are likely to check who voted on it and read all the comments.

• Your reputation on Digg depends primarily on the quality of the stories you submit. It's okay to submit a piece of content you wrote every once and a while, but be sure to mix it in with a healthy ratio of other great content that the community will enjoy. If you submit spam or crap, Digg will restrict your account and users will quickly blackball you.

The Sweet Taste of Success

So, finally, you've paid your dues. You've been active for a few weeks and you've dugg hundreds or thousands of fun stories. Now you find people are automatically reading and digging stories that you submit. You're nurtured a genuine, symbiotic connection with some of your friends and you start to understand their quirks and personalities.

At this point, instead of submitting a story and getting 2 diggs, you'll get at least 10 or 20. Because you're hooked up. And you know people. You're finally grooving with the social aspect of "social media."

Once you your story gets a bump of more than 15 or so diggs, it has a fighting chance. Your story becomes visible in the "Upcoming Stories" section, and if the content is truly compelling then it will make the home page.

When it breaks on through to the other side, you'll finally get a hit of the Digg Crack – the massive emotional rush of creating national news and reading the hundreds of comments and reactions to your story. It's one of the strongest buzzes that that you can get while sitting in front of the computer.

And it's not rocket science or voodoo magic... it just takes participation. So, what are you waiting for? Flick open your Firefox tabs and start digging!

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Oh, those wily Viagra spammers!

Their no-holds-barred marketing campaigns have provided cheap pills and thrills for the young and old who most desperately need some. But they have also managed to forever associate Pfizer's breakthrough drug brand with spam. A few months back, rogue Viagra dealers were penetrating top of the SERP's by parasite hosting on .edu sites. They would hack a last-updated-in-'97 Native American languages forum, bribe a library assistant with a month's salary, or offer a frathouse a truckload of magic blue pills in order to get their hands on a linkjuice-engorged .edu page that they could redirect to their "pharmacy" site. Google seems to have cleaned most of the .edu parasite pages out of the top Viagra rankings, so they've moved on to deeper strongholds. Popular social media sites like Digg and Reddit host a constant stream of fresh content and traffic, so they enjoy enviably high PageRank. Most of the spamming on these sites is people submitting commercial stories and trying to make them popular in hopes of a brief burst of traffic and some backlinks. The lowest rung of social media spammer is the newbie who submits blatantly commercial headlines without knowing any better. For their effort, they get a worthless link and they might even get a click or two for before the story gets voted out.

The slightly more sophisticated spammer tries to actually get votes and make their "story" popular:

The user Katbo (according to his profile has zero Diggs, zero friends, two submission and two made popular!) most likely got his press release to the home page by purchasing random Diggs from a blackhat pay-for-votes service, orchestrating sock-puppet accounts, or by soliciting friends to vote via e-mail. Recently I came across a more effective, outside-the-box approach of spamming by using Digg and Reddit for parasite hosting. Here's from the page one SERP at Google for "buy Viagra":

By creating a keyword targeted page or profile on a strong, legitimate social media domain and pointing several hundred spammy backlinks at it, they were able to pump their link up to the top of Google for an uber-competitive query. Schwing! Some impressive (but short term) performance enhancement. Read the rest of this entry »