It Takes a Gathering to Build a Crowd

May 5, 2008 at 10:42 pm (Blogging, Digg, Google, SEO, Social Media Marketing, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Yahoo Buzz) (, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , )

In this guest post Steven Snell (who writes about social media at Traffikd) examines the topic of generating readership for your blog through social media.

gathering-crowd.jpg
Image by shoothead

If you spend much time on social media websites, I’m sure you’ve noticed that you tend to see many of the same websites and blogs on the front page receiving the most exposure. A few months ago I wrote a post at Daily Blog Tips that posed the question Do Small Bloggers Have a Chance with Digg? Through my observations and through the comments from many readers, it’s clear that large websites and blogs have a distinct advantage over smaller blogs when it comes to social media. Obviously, this can be frustrating to new bloggers who are looking to get some much-needed exposure from social media, as it seems to be the rich just getting richer.

One question that needs to be addressed is, what is the most significant factor that leads to the success of these large websites with social media? Is their content just that much better than smaller blogs? In my opinion, many times this isn’t the case. Is it because they have a larger existing audience? I’d say this is often a bigger factor than the quality issue. Very popular blogs tend to do well with social media, and with their incredibly large subscriber bases, they have a distinct advantage.

Take for example the front page of Delicious. Typically it takes about 100 bookmarks within 24 hours or so to get to the front page. It seems like almost every day there is a post from Smashing Magazine or Zen Habits on the front page. With over 60,000 and 50,000 readers respectively, a small percentage of subscribers can easily put these posts on the front page with a bookmark. On the other hand, a smaller blog with only 100 subscribers would need one bookmark per subscriber to make the front page.

So how does this affect smaller bloggers who want to get better results from social media? Essentially it shows that great content alone is usually not enough. It takes a gathering to build a crowd. Meaning, your gathering of existing readers and your network of friends can help to result in a bigger crowd that comes from social media sites.

New bloggers that are targeting social media, or those who have just been disappointed with their results to this point need to focus on building the gathering before the crowd will come. Networking is probably the most significant activity for bloggers in terms of gaining social media traffic. A blogger’s network includes readers and subscribers as well as friends and contacts who are bloggers themselves. Members of your network will be much more likely to vote for you on social media sites, plus you can openly ask for their help when you need it the most.

There are several different ways to get social media votes:

1 - Visitors of social media sites can see your link at the social media site and vote there (example, a Digg user visits the upcoming page, clicks through to your link, returns to Digg and votes for your post).

2 – Visitors of your blog can vote by using a button, widget, or link on your blog.

3 – Visitors can use a toolbar to vote (examples, StumbleUpon and Delicious toolbars).

4 – Social media users can share your post with their friends (example, the shout feature at Digg).

5 – Bloggers can email (or IM) others in their network to request a vote.

The only one of these that is not affected by the existing “crowd” of a blog is #1. Getting votes from the upcoming page is not really affected by how many readers you have at your blog, rather it is affected by how many people see the item on the upcoming page, the quality of the title (in terms of attracting clicks), the quality of the content once people click-through, etc. Certainly there are some small blogs that have success this way without a network, but this seems to be the minority.

All of the other four are affected by how many people are seeing the page and how many people are in the blogger’s network. Let’s quickly look at each one. For #2, the more visitors a page has (which is impacted by the number of subscribers), the more opportunities it has to get votes through a button. If a post only gets 5 visitors, the most votes it can possibly get through a “Digg This” button is five. On the other hand, if the post gets 5,000 visitors, its potential for votes just multiplied by 1,000. The situation in #3, visitors voting using a toolbar, is exactly the same scenario.

Item numbers 4 and 5 are both impacted by the blogger’s network of friends and contacts. If you have a large existing network and you’re willing to ask them for some help occasionally, you can get some quick and easy votes. Whether you’re using a share feature at a social media site or simply sending a private email, your success will depend on the quality and quantity of connections you have made in addition to the quality of the content itself.

I Don’t Have a Crowd. What Can I Do?

Understanding how all of this works is good, but if you’re a new blogger with a limited network and a small base of subscribers it doesn’t help you very much, yet. If you’re looking to improve your results with social media, do what you can to get one step closer to blogs that have a bigger reach than you. Work on building your network and send as much traffic as possible to your posts.

Here are a few tips:
1 – Still focus on content

In order to build your crowd you’ll need to give them a reason to consistently read your blog. Publishing high-quality content is the best way to do this. Although I said earlier that the existing audience is often more important than the content itself for social media success, the content still needs to be of a certain standard of quality.

2 – Dedicate time to networking

Most bloggers network casually whenever it happens. This is fine, but you can step up your network by making it a priority. Use social media sites and other blogs as opportunities to connect with other bloggers and get to know others who share some of your interests. Be active on blogs in your niche and make an effort to get to know those bloggers. Don’t limit your involvement with just A-list bloggers. Make an effort to get to know other bloggers who are at the same stage in the blogging lifecycle as you. In this case you’ll be able to help each other as you both grow your blogs.

3 – Funnel traffic

Most bloggers create posts from time-to-time that they expect to draw some attention from social media. When you have a post that you want to get some exposure, don’t just focus on getting Diggs or Stumbles. You can use smaller social media sites and niche social media sites to funnel traffic to the post. As visitors come from other social media sites they may also Digg or Stumble your post. If you have some other way to get traffic to these posts, such as getting a link from a friend or from a community website, do so. The more visitors you can get to the page, the better your chances will be of getting some votes.

4 – Don’t be afraid to ask for a vote

Some bloggers and social media users don’t like to ask others for a vote. While there is nothing wrong with this approach, I’ve found that other social media users who are legitimately your friends (not just someone you added as a friend at Digg) will be happy to give you a vote if your content is worthy, and you can return the favor for them as well. I get a decent number of requests each week, and as long as it’s from someone I know and not just a spam request, I’m happy to at least consider the vote.

After The Gathering is Built

Once you have built a gathering of subscribers and those in your network, drawing the crowd from social media will be incredibly more realistic. Not only will it be more realistic, but it will happen more frequently, as you can observe from the larger blogs mentioned at the beginning of this post.

What’s Your Approach?

How do you go about getting votes for social media? Is your success with social media impacted by your network?

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Social Influence Marketing: Motivations, Influencers & Tactics for Success

May 5, 2008 at 1:59 pm (Blogging, Digg, SEO, Social Media Marketing, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Yahoo Buzz) (, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , )

Here’s my latest article on Social Influence Marketing where I delve into how those peer influences actually. Let me know what you think of this one.

At the root of Social Influence Marketing™ is how peer influences work. With the digital world going social, we recognize that peer influence is having a greater affect on brand affinity and purchasing decisions than any traditional form of marketing. Customers are excited about doing the marketing themselves if the product is strong. We also know that with the proliferation of social technologies from mainstream social networks like MySpace and Facebook to niche social tools like del.icio.us (bookmarking) and FriendFeed (personal content aggregation), the peer influence may take many different forms.

But how exactly do these peer influences work? What motivates a person to share a piece of media with a group of friends or participate in an online community? How does one person’s purchasing behavior affect another’s?  Who are the consumers doing the influencing? And how can you design for influence? In this article, I discuss the motivations to share, how the location of a person in a network plays a role, and whether you can market to those influencers. I then provide tactics specific to the retail sector to take advantage of peer influence.

Motivations to Share

Abraham Maslow emphasized that personal value precedes network and social value in his hierarchy of needs theory. He argued that most people are not selfish but self interested  – they are always searching for an answer to the question – what’s in it for me?  This applies to the web domain where people don’t share and allow peer influences to take place just for the sake of it. People share online when they are incented to and when there’s potential for personal value to be realized.

Clay Shirky and Peter Kollock also point out that once a person has been able to derive strong individual benefit from a particular experience, the motivation to share increases significantly. This happens as the user realizes that through the collective action (or experience) there’s opportunity to derive even more personal value from it.

What are the implications of this? When you design a website or online marketing campaigns, remember that if the experience isn’t valuable to one person, it won’t be to a hundred, a thousand, or a million people. Tied to that, consumers must be able to derive greater value through the act of sharing for them to make that effort. For example, a person would be more likely to share a piece of media to influence a peer if the act of sharing enhances his reputation among those peers or if it encourages the peers to participate in the social activity too.

Location in the Network

Not everybody is inclined to play a role in influence either. People use the Internet in different ways, and their usage patterns dictate how likely they are to share information and influence each other. But more than that, their location in an online community or social network heavily influences their likelihood of playing a role in influencing others.

The closer a person is to the center of the conversations, and the more people he is connected to, the more likely he is to influence his peers. Because he is directly involved in many different conversations, his peers typically treat him as a credible or appealing information source. They get used to getting information from him and get used to sharing information with him, providing him with something to respond to in turn.

As a result, this person is in a much stronger position to influence a peer than someone who only occasionally participates in the conversation or is just loosely connected to the group. In fact, this is how the influential bloggers work too – because they are at the center of conversations sharing a lot of information themselves, they have lots of influence.

The same philosophy applies to networks of friends and how they share information online. Why does this matter? It is important to recognize that not every Web user is a candidate for peer influence. Only those that are at the center of their networks communicate actively and regularly with their peers and can play this role. Look for those people, and meet their needs as you design for influence.

Influencers are not Brand Advocates

A report from JupiterResearch highlights that nearly 25% of all online adults are brand advocates. They are more likely to research and purchase products online too. But as the reported pointed out, these brand advocates focus on gathering product information and purchasing them, rather than spreading the word through social media sites. They are not the most important influencers.

Rather, the most important influencers are the people who play a role further down the purchasing funnel. They are the people who are solicited for advice while a consumer is in the consideration phase of a purchasing decision. These people are in the consumer’s network – online and offline. They serve as validation points sharing their own experiences of a product with the consumer, pointing the consumer to resources that can affect the purchasing decision, and weigh in with their own opinions. How do you reach them?

Contrary to traditional word-of-mouth marketing strategies or even viral marketing, you don’t. You let your potential customers, who are in the consideration phase of a purchasing decision, reach out to them. Why? Because these influencers don’t vary by product, rather they vary by consumers. And it is difficult for you as a marketer to know who the core influencers for a brand consideration or particular purchasing decision are. In some cases, it may be the consumer’s parents or it may be the friends, or peers at work or relatively anonymous peers in a discussion forum, or maybe a combination of all these.

Tactics for Success

So if you cannot reach these important influencers that are having a far greater influence on purchasing decisions than any other form of marketing, what can you do? You can formulate your web strategies to allow for those peer influences to take place. I introduced some tactics in my previous article, here are some more but specific to online retail experiences –

1. Integrate more deeply with the social networks. Yes, your consumers are spending a lot of time on these social networks, and that won’t change anytime soon. Office Depot allows consumers to post messages directly to their Facebook profiles, or into their newsfeeds, about products they are interested in. It does this from the product page on its site. It makes it easier for a consumer to solicit feedback from his peers.

Other e-retailers should follow by integrating directly with the social networks allowing consumers to get feedback more directly during their purchasing process. For example, a consumer should be able to take a product from a retailer Web site, post information about it in his social network, and solicit feedback via a poll from his network seamlessly. No one does this today.

2. Point customers to third-party review sites. Consumers are going to go to third-party review sites regardless of what you tell them on yours. So rather than trying to stop them, point your consumers to the most authorative and credible ones out there. They will appreciate this and return to your site once they are ready to make a purchase. Most sites point to favorable product reviews in the mainstream media, but that’s not enough.

By pointing to the blogs and review sites themselves, consumers will know where to look for more information, and they’ll find communities of peers looking to make similar purchases. These are peers that can positively influence them.

3.Tie more directly with the offline shopping experience. Consumers move between the online and the offline space as they make product purchasing decisions. The iPhone and other mobile devices that simplify web surfing are making this happen more. In fact, Google has seen a 20% increase in searches from mobile phones in the last few months.

Therefore, as you think about an online shopping experience, keep in mind those offline scenarios and how social influence can support them. A consumer might be surfing to your web site or broadcasting to his Facebook network asking for advice while standing in a retail outlet looking directly at your product. So for example, consider publishing the customer reviews for a particular product that were originally published online in the retail store itself. Staples is already doing this successfully.

4. Make the product a strong discussion point. We’re used to thinking of products in terms of features and specifications in relation to other products on retail Web sites. Separately, we think of online communities and social networks as places where people talk to each other. Those two worlds can blur if you allow for more conversations around the product. It’ll lead to more peer influences.

Amazon has started doing this with their Customer Discussions. These aren’t customer reviews, rather, they are forums to discuss the products and everything about them. They are designed to enable conversations about a product that people are interested in.

5. Leverage your employees to build online communities. Both Best Buy and Circuit City in different, but exciting ways, encourage their employees to participate in their online communities on their retail Web sites. These employees answer customer queries about specific products, advise each other on technical issues and demonstrate that there are real, authentic people who care behind the brand.

Why does this matter? Because when these employees play authentic and personal roles in online communities where consumers are making purchasing decisions, they blur the lines between sales representative and peer influencer. That’s not a bad thing, necessarily which is why these retailers, and others, should encourage their employees to participate in third-party online communities too – as long as they do so honestly, authentically, and appropriately.

Social Influence Marketing™ takes many different forms. As we’ve seen, at the root of Social Influence Marketing™ are the peer influences that can positively affect brand affinity and purchasing decisions. Taking advantage of social media, by tapping into the Social Influence Marketing™ concepts, requires a more rigorous understanding of those peer influencers. Only through a focused understanding and appropriate design tactics can you take advantage of one of the most important dimensions to marketing today.

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Numbers Can’t Tell the Whole Story

May 5, 2008 at 1:51 pm (Digg, SEO, Social Media Marketing, StumbleUpon, Twitter) (, , , , , , , , , , )

Visitors Traffic GraphWith social media marketing, numbers get thrown around a lot. How many visitors did you get to a particular post? How many visitors were sent from which social media sites? How many inbound links were gained? While these are some of the reasons that most of us are involved in social media marketing, it’s easy to get distracted by the numbers an lose focus of what you’re really trying to accomplish.

Ways that numbers can be deceiving:

1 – Visitors from social media can’t accurately be compared to other types of traffic sources

Getting 1,000 visitors from StumbleUpon is much different than getting 1,000 visitors from search engines. It’s also different than getting 1,000 visitors from online advertising. It’s very difficult to compare social media traffic stats to other sources because it is so much different. The standard answer is that social media traffic is less valuable than other types of traffic, but this isn’t always the case. Niche social media sites can send highly-targeted visitors, and there are plenty of other traffic sources that aren’t the highest quality. Try to avoid comparing apples to oranges.

2 – Visitors from one social media site can’t be compared to another

Each social media site has it’s own unique audience. It’s very difficult to compare the the traffic you get from two different social media sites. Digg may send 20,000 visitors to a post, but the 1,000 you received from a niche social media site may have been more valuable. Because each site is different, try not to judge one audience simply because it doesn’t compare favorably to another social media site in terms of numbers.

3 – Social media can be manipulated

Social media marketing sometimes blurs the line between optimizing a site for social media and manipulating the results. A website that draws huge numbers of traffic to genuinely high quality content will have better long-term results than one that gains an advantage in order to send traffic to content that isn’t of the highest quality. Essentially, manipulating the results may produce impressive numbers, but the results will be disappointing if the content isn’t worth the attention that it got.

4 – Return on investment is difficult to calculate

With other types of marketing and advertising, return on investment is going to determine the success of the campaign and future efforts will be built around these results. With social media it’s difficult, if not impossible, to calculate ROI accurately. There are so many elements that are involved with social media marketing that don’t produce results that can be measured with specific numbers.

5 – You can’t rely on traffic from social media

If you have 50,000 visitors from social media to your blog in one month, the next month you could have 200 or you could have 200,000. It simply is not consistent and predictable. This can make it difficult for selling or buying ads if the site relies heavily on social media. One big month unfortunately doesn’t mean that the blog has turned the corner and that traffic will be lasting. It may or it may not. Of course, if you learn throughout the process, your chances will be much better of maintaining or improving traffic levels.

6 – CPM can be thrown off

If you are trying to calculate the value of your visitors, this can greatly vary depending on what percentage of your visitors are from social media. Visitors that come from social media tend to ignore advertisements, so your click-through rates on AdSense will be lower.

7 – Subscriber numbers may be inflated

If you reach a larger number of visitors in a day with a site like Digg or StumbleUpon, you may see that the next day your subscriber count experienced a big jump. Frequently, it will drop a bit the next day. I’ve learned through experience to expect a percentage of those new subscribers to be gone quickly. This doesn’t always happen, but it can be very disappointing if you’re not prepared for it.

8 – Numbers can’t show impact

Just because a post receives a lot of traffic through social media doesn’t mean that anything has really been accomplished. Hopefully it does have an impact, but visitors alone do not mean much if they never come back, they don’t subscribe, they don’t click on an ad, etc,

What Does This Mean?

1 – You need to know what you want to get out of social media

If you’re using social media to gain exposure and grow your blog, you need to know specifically what it is that you want to accomplish. Without a plan you’ll be left with nothing but some number that really don’t mean anything.

2 – Don’t rely too heavily on social media traffic

Because it’s not consistent, you shouldn’t rely too much on social media. I’m all for optimizing your website or blog for social media and doing what you can to help your chances, but sometimes it just won’t happen. Focus on building diversity in traffic.

3 – Keep trying to improve the results and effectiveness

The learning curve with social media marketing is pretty sharp. By that I mean that you can quickly learn a lot of things that you can immediately put into practice to improve your results. Analyze your results and find the methods that work the best for you in terms of achieving your goals.

4 – Don’t be too quick to judge

Because the numbers can be so deceiving, don’t judge a particular social media site or method of marketing before you’ve given it a fair chance. Don’t give up on a specific social media site because you didn’t become popular the first week you were using the site.

What’s Your Opinion?

How do you feel about the numbers that are involved with social media? Do you agree that they can be very misleading? Why or why not?

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Understanding the Value of ‘Friends’ in Social Media Websites

May 3, 2008 at 5:33 pm (Blogging, Digg, Social Media Marketing, StumbleUpon, Twitter) (, , , , , , )

Most social media websites give you an individual profile page alongside the option of befriending other site users. The adding of someone as a ‘friend’ on a social media website is not just an empty gesture. Usually when you add someone as a friend, you’re giving them greater access to you through the social media channel.

For example, some Digg users set their message inbox as ‘friends only’, so you can only ’shout’ or communicate with other users through the site when they have added you as a friend. Only when someone on Twitter ‘follows’ or adds you, will you have the ability to send them private messages or view his/her updates, if they are protected.

In sites like Facebook, adding someone as a friend allows them to see more of your profile (depending on your settings). Befriending users on Youtube allows you to follow their rating and favoriting on videos, while also allowing you to more easily share content with one another.

In general, when someone adds you as a friend on a social media service, you gain some or all of the following benefits:

  1. Access to more data. You get to view more data on the user, some of which may be intentionally obscured from the public or other non-friend users. This allows you to network with the specific user in a more intimate and personal setting.
  2. Greater communication options. Depending on the social site, when someone adds you as a friend, they open up more avenues of communication. This adds a greater level of interactivity: you can connect with the person who added you through private/direct messages, instead of the highly visible public channel.
  3. Recommended content. When someone adds you as a friend (and vice versa), your activity or actions on the site may be recommended or ‘pushed’ towards the other person in some part of their admin panel or profile. This means that you’ll get greater visibility automatically whenever you use the social website.
  4. Greater Social Proof. An auxiliary advantage of having many fans on social media websites is social proof, especially when the social site itself ranks the users according to the no. of followers/subscribers they have. Popular and visible users tend to accumulate friends more easily than unknown users.

Basically, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain when someone adds you as a friend on any social media website. They are giving you permission to share messages with them while bestowing attention on your recommendations/actions within the social site.

If you’re trying to get maximum visibility for your message, develop a popular social profile that has a large amount of fans in order to take advantage of the innate advantage that comes from communicating with a large number of people at once through a specific action.

You can see this most easily in highly subscribed Youtube channels. A video can easily rack up over 10,000 views in one day if it is released by a highly subscribed channel owner. Similarly, marketers or web personalities enjoy increasing their Twitter fanbase because they benefit from the influence they derive from consistently wielding a large amount of attention.

Are There Benefits to Having Mutual Friends on Social Websites?

social media friends
Image Credit: mario party

Depending on their level of particpation, some of these users will become part of your inner circle: the people you interact with the most on the social site. You’ll notice that you’re often talking to the same people on Twitter, Friendfeed or Facebook. More erratic or non-regular users will connect with you less, only when they use the site.

This brings to mind something that is rarely discussed by social media marketers. Are there benefits to mutual friendship on social media websites? Should you only befriend people who befriend you and make sure that you only have mutual friends?

There’s no simple answer for this question because it depends on two things: The infrastructure of the social media site and your goals or how you want to use the site.

Let’s use StumbleUpon as an example. Some have suggested that it’s important to only have mutual friends on StumbleUpon since there’s a friend limit of 200 users. I think that’s just a really limited perspective on how to develop popularity on StumbleUpon.

I don’t recommend this strategy because the only feature-based benefit that you’ll get from a mutual SU friendship is the use of the send-to feature on the toolbar. This option is not used by most active users, does not help to increase traffic significantly and is liable to be abused by spammers who send you multiple pages of content irrelevant to your interests every day.

Who you befriend on Stumbleupon influences what pages you see when you click the stumble button: this means you should try to add users who often stumble content within your field of interest, in order to improve your user-experience, regardless if they are friends or not.

What one needs to understand is that friend networks serve different purposes on each social media site so the value of mutual friendships will differ. This is something you’ll instinctively realize when you spend a lot of time on using each specific social channel.

Next week, I may talk about some friend network building strategies you can use. Feel free to leave a comment and pose any questions you may have!

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Greasemonkey Scripts For the Social Media Addict

May 3, 2008 at 5:05 pm (Blogging, Digg, Social Media Marketing, StumbleUpon, Twitter) (, , , , , , , , , , , , )

You may have heard of Greasemonkey, the Firefox extension that lets you customize the way a web page displays using small bits of Javascript, but are you using it to its fullest potential? There are hundreds of scripts available for installation from userscripts.org, so it can be difficult to know which ones are must-haves.

We’ve rounded up our favorite scripts for fans of social media and have provided them for you below, but we’re curious which ones you can’t live without. Are your favorites included here? Let us know in the comments.

Twitter Scripts

FriendFeed Scripts

Digg Scripts

Mixx Needs More Scripts

  • Mixx Forums - adds MixxingBowl Forum and Breaking News links to navigation bar at Mixx.com

Del.icio.us/Ma.gnolia Scripts

Flickr Scripts

  • Flickr Cut-n-Paste to Blog - cut-and-paste flickr images to blog posts with CSS and credit links
  • Flickr AllSizes+ - access all sizes for a Flickr photo, copy the code, download the image, etc.
  • Flickr More Home - by default, the Flickr home page shows four images for you, four from your contacts, and four from everyone. This script expands it to 8, 16, and 8, respectively.
  • Flickr - Video Hider - hides videos on Flickr photostreams and replaces them with a link to that video should you still wish to view it
  • Tflickr - Twitter from Flickr. Tweet your favourites flickr images
  • Flickr: Sign In and Return - return to the page you were viewing instead of Flickr home page after signing in

Facebook Scripts

Google Reader Scripts

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5 Tips To Help You Go Viral

May 3, 2008 at 11:35 am (Blogging, Digg, Social Media Marketing, StumbleUpon) (, , , )

Todays viral post is going to be a little different, but I wanted to share a few tips for going viral that have been on my mind this week, so here goes:

#1 Think about the audience - You need to research out the group of people you will be targeting, and the social communities they use. There are a ton of targeted social networks out there, but trying to get on them all with one post is just plain silly. Angling Masters is one of the biggest social networks for fishermen, but probably not the best place for a viral piece about fashion disasters. If you know you can create a viral piece about going Green, or something to help the environment then finding the social communities for eco-friendly stories is what you want to be looking for. Go and check out the stories that are popular, or that have made it popular in the past. Find the ones that have received the most votes, and research out the titles, content and exactly just what made them go “viral”.

#2 Create Amazing Content For Actual Readers - Don’t just think $Dollar$ signs when creating a content piece you want to go viral. The truth of the matter is very little stories that go viral actually make people any money. Especially the ones that go viral on some of the bigger communities that are out there like Digg, Reddit or Delicious. How you benefit is from exposure, and the links that will be built up over the months and years. I have stories that made the front page of Digg years ago that still get new links every week, and I still see traffic from every single day. Thats right - EVERY SINGLE DAY! Why? The content is worth reading, and content worth reading is worth sharing and sharing again.

#3 Think Like A Viral Marketer - Now when you get good at this, it will scare you. You will be doing normal everyday stuff and think to yourself - “That could make a good viral post”! Sometimes its even sickening … The other day I was driving and right in front of me (I am talking RIGHT in front of me) a HUGE car crash … someone blew threw a stop sign and t-boned a truck toeing a trailer, and that truck started spinning right towards me. The first thing I thought of? Get my iPhone out and take a picture, and my second thought was that I wish I had a camera to capture that because one of my clients is in the Trucking safety industry, and there has got to be something I could use that video on!!! Then the ideas started flowing - “10 of the Craziest crashes ever caught on video” or “10 Of The Craziest Crashes Ever Filmed By An Amatuer”. You get the point - my mind is sick and wrong. Its funny because even the simple everyday interactions with my kids - I have a never ending supply of viral posts because of all the funny stuff they do for anyone in a kids industry!

#4 Networking - It is one thing to just become a “member” of a social network and vote on stuff, but if you can truly understand the point of the community, become a good active member of it, and contribute to it, you will see amazing results. Make friends, vote on their stuff, share it with others of every single network you are a part of, and in turn they will do the same for you. Just today I saw a post of mine show up on another targeted social network for women from a person I made friends with about a month ago. It all does come back, so don’t be greedy with your time or participation.

#5 Have Fun - If you can’t have fun, or make fun of yourself and what you are doing then you have no place in the social networks. People who thrive in the social communities and have stuff go viral all the time are the ones that love what they do. They live, eat, breathe, and drink social media. I am not saying you have to become that crazy, but if you love what you are doing, then you will become good at it. If you are new to social networking my biggest piece of advice would be to have fun, make friends, contribute to the community and enjoy the networks that you are a part of! You will see it pay off in the end!

If you enjoyed this Post and have something to say then please post a Comment

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Exclusive Interview With Muhammad Saleem

May 2, 2008 at 10:29 pm (Blogging, Digg, SEO, Social Media Marketing, StumbleUpon) (, , )

It’s not much of a secret that getting a story onto the front page of Digg is without a glimmer a doubt, something that will absolutely skyrocket your traffic (hows 20,000-50,000 visitors sound?), and while many successfully manage to eventually get their much beloved websites there, it often takes a whole lot of blood, tears and bucket loads of sweat to make it. Well except for Digg user msaleem, who’s managed to successfully and legitimately land a whopping 1,161 articles onto the fortress heavily guarded by nerds armed with a barrage of unwarranted insults, and an abnormal lack of exposure to natural sunlight and society as a whole - otherwise known as Diggs front page. And if that wasn’t enough, Muhammad has also managed to become a top user over at propeller.

If I mentioned the user name ‘msaleem’ out of a pool of over one million registered users to a regular contributor over at Digg - or Propeller for that matter, chances are they’d know whom I’m referring to. A self professed social media maven, extremely talented writer, creative thinker, and university student, Saleem is considered the second most successful and largest contributor on Digg - so when the opportunity to conduct an interview came along, best believe I wasn’t going to let this one slip. And now that I’ve ‘obtained’ Muhammad until the end of the interview (let me check if his still confined to my dungeon), we better get crackin’ before he finds a way to escape.

Thanks very much for agreeing to take time out to do this Muhammad. Let’s kick things off!

How long have you been involved with social media?

I’ve been involved in social media since Late 2005.

What do you find most frustrating about Digg?

One of the most annoying things is that the algorithm actually works against the top contributors which is counterintuitive. Also, they need to be more open in their communication with their community.

Is there anything in particular you can tell us about Digg and Propeller traffic? How much of it do you manage to retain? *

They say that the conversion rate for social media traffic is one-third that of search traffic. However, after using social media, you also increase your google traffic, which you can add to the conversion.

What kind of articles - in your experience - typically tend to hold up well after submission?

The articles that truly create value, and content that is evergreen is more likely to convert better, and also bring good long-term traffic.

I understand you deal with a whole string of other social media websites. What would you deem to be your favorite, and why?

My favorite has to be StumbleUpon. The content is great, I love the discovery aspect of it, and the community is genuinely appreciative of your participation. I love networking through StumbleUpon.

What do you feel is key to making an article hit the front page, and why?

Honestly, there is no magic to it. You need good content, submitted by a user in good standing and you have a hit on your hands. You have to participate on the site, of course, to know what kind of content the community appreciates.

Have you fallen victim to the notorious ‘comment abuse’ that seems to regularly occur on Digg - and if so, how has it effected you?

I’ve been abused on the comments a few times but I’ve learned not to care about that. Anonymity on the web breeds idiots and we just cannot let it bother us.

Browsing around on your StumbleUpon profile, I noticed you were also a hired scout on Propeller. What’s that like?

Being a hired scout has been great. We get to interact with the management, the programmers/developers and get to give direct input on the future direction of the site. We’re also going to be unveiling an awesome new site soon.

You can visit Muhammad’s blog by clicking here.

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The Problems with Digg

May 2, 2008 at 10:00 pm (Digg, SEO, Social Media Marketing) (, , , )

DiggSocial media websites have changed the way people discover new media and there are many websites out there that use some sort of social media format so my criticisms are not directed at all of the sites, however one of the supposedly leading social media sites is Digg.com which I believe has many shortcomings and rather than being a place where diverse points of view are expressed it is looking more and more like a site full of marketing hype and political plugs.

Having been turned off by Digg (although I admit to still submitting some articles there in hopes that there are still a few real users there who may be interested in my content) I have begun to look at other social media websites such as Reddit.com, Propeller and Mixx. Something that these sites have in common compared to Digg is that they have markedly lower vote counts for the stories that make the front page of the site. This is because, unlike Digg, these sites don’t provide a conducive environment to inflating vote counts. Digg is set up in such a way that users on the site add friends and send “shouts” to one another to digg stories.

On the surface this system of sending messages to users who may find your content to be interesting makes sense but in practice it leads to “power users” on the site (who I am guessing are paid to do this sort of work by someone else) that spend their time trolling lists of users and adding and removing friends to achieve the perfect combination of users who are most likely to digg their stories, often exchanging the digging of their stories in return.

If you don’t believe me, just take a look through the Digg “Popular” pages and you will see an abundance of Apple and Ipod themed articles as well as numerous articles about the U.S. political elections. I find it very odd that a large company with a large advertising budget such as Apple and politicians who are essentially trying to buy votes find their way to the front page so often of what is touted as being a next generation user supported social media site. To me Digg is starting to look a lot like MSN.com or any other similar generic news website out there.

The friend and voting systems on the other social media websites seem to be less conducive to this sort of thing which I believe leads to the lower vote counts on these sites for top stories rather than that they necessarily have a smaller number of active users. If you want to test what I have said for yourself, create an account on Digg and go through and add a few hundred friends to your profile, be sure to add a few of the users who are submitting the articles that are making the Digg front page. After not long you will be bombarded by “shout spam” which is literally a torrent of your “friends” asking you to Digg their worthless articles.

I wonder if the owners of Digg are aware of this and choose to do nothing or if they are actively working on a solution to this issue. Regardless, I encourage those who have a genuine interest in social media to broaden their search as there are a lot of sites out there to try and you may find yourself not missing Digg after long if you find another site you like. I still believe that this is an issue that plagues the majority of social media websites but at least it seems some of the sites are taking measures to reduce this problem and hopefully at some point we will see it eliminated. All that I know for now is that you can put your vote in by using the sites that don’t encourage this and shunning those that do as sites like Digg.com will eventually have to straighten out if they expect to continue to receive large volumes of traffic.

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Yahoo Buzz Introduces Widgets and RSS Feeds to Take On Digg

May 1, 2008 at 9:28 pm (Digg, Social Media Marketing, Yahoo Buzz) (, , , , , )

Yahoo BuzzYahoo Buzz, a more elementary competitor to Digg and other vote-based link aggregation and promotion engines of similar ilk, has showed be quite popular in the months following its February debut. Though Yahoo has been criticized for failing to provide a more collaborative, social structure with the service - which remains in beta, we should add - it has proven to be an immense boost to a select supply of publishers. Yahoo notes sites like HowStuffWorks and RollingStone as the recipients of millions of page views.

Today the company is adding to the functions of Yahoo Buzz, introducing a widget-generation utility which website publishers can use to embed on pages to showcase stories listed on Buzz, whether they be general items or specific to categories, like sports, business, or science and technology. Yahoo has also established RSS feeds for top stories as well as individual categories.

As for improvements made to the main site structure, Yahoo has a few new inclusions, one being a simple “First Buzzed By” tag in which it designates a particular Buzz user with submitting said link or story, and another being the option for users to roam their personal voting histories.

May 1, 2008 — 09:17 AM PDT — by Paul Glazowski

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Did Digg Try to “Tigerproof” Their Course?

April 30, 2008 at 6:37 pm (Digg, Social Media Marketing) (, , , , , )

Tiger Woods Flexing The changes in the Digg algorithm over the last week have resulted in a lot of chatter among marketers, bloggers, and media.  Giving credit where credit is certainly due, I do think that Digg’s update definitely made it harder to push through non-organic popularity (read: spam).  In spite of these changes, my contention is that all these changes for “diversity” just make it harder for the littlest guy (the organic user) to participate in the process and it’s negatively impacted their product.

As Tiger Woods started winning tournaments and absolutely turned Augusta National into his personal playground, some tournament directors made the decision to “Tigerproof” their courses.  They started lengthening holes so that Tiger would have to hit long irons into greens rather than wedges.  This “Tigerproofing” was supposed to level the playing field again.

It was a phenomenal news story but it actually makes very little sense to anyone who has ever played competitive golf.  Sure, Tiger may have to go Driver -> 4-iron into a long par 4 now, but what about the other 95% of the Tour players that are faced with a par 4 that is essentially a par 5 for them now?  In the end, all this “Tigerproofing” did was favor Tiger and the longer players.  It’s all relative and a real “leveling” of the playing field would have been to shorten everything leaving everyone to score with wedges and putters (which, incidentally, Tiger probably still would have won as consistently).

So, when Digg raised the vote threshold to a pretty ridiculous standard for power accounts in the name of “diversity”, this was their attempt to “Tigerproof” their course from a select few users who had above average success in getting stories to the front page.  It’s a strategy that does hold some merit as many of those accounts were built by marketers or users with other agendas, but it’s also a slap in the face to many of their oldest contributors who never took a dime and acted as meta-guides to much of the content.

Additionaly, these changes made in the name of “diversity” has also produced the unfortunate side effect of killing the freshness factor of their product.  In the era of short news cycles and instant consumption, it is taking almost a full day for yesterday’s news to make the front page.  Somewhere, Matt Drudge is laughing.

Now, if you raise the bar to success at Digg, who do you think will adjust and adapt…organic users who get very little benefit or power marketers who are incented to generate Digg traffic?  Over the long haul, it’s going to be the power marketers (and the one or two organic users who maintain some sort of religious affinity to Digg, aka “the never touched bewbs” crowd).

I’ve seen this type of inflection at least three times in Digg’s history.  It generally takes us a few months to recover…but we always do.  We are incented by profit.  We adapt.  The large publishing partners that Digg is getting into bed with have no problem bringing “diversity”, so they will succeed.  And the people Digg probably wishes would be there best users are left out to dry with that knife in their back.

The other question I’m fielding a lot is, “How do you think this plays into their strategy to sell Digg?” First, it gives them something to point at when bigger, older media companies start talking about the risk of user generated ecosystems.  Secondly, it gets everyone talking about Digg again while they are soliciting buyers.  Thirdly, it certainly isn’t a coincidence that it drives many more page views for each session at Digg.  Crusty old media companies and advertisers love them some page views.

So, if you’re scoring at home:

1.  Good quality tweak.
2.  May impress acquirors of Digg.
3.  Because it appeases their risk models and page view appetites.
4.  But it pissed off their meta-users.
5.  And reinforced the chances for marketers over the long term.
6.  While ruining the “freshness” of their news.

I’m really not sure who wins here.  It’s certainly not bewbs.

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