With more than a half million members, 8 million+ visitors, and consistently ranked among the top 100 most popular Web sites each month, Digg has become the Web 2.0 wunderkind of the social news media. A story appearing on the popular news aggregating Web site is fast becoming a high-tech PR grand slam in an industry that weighs "hits" based on a media outlet's scope and impact.
If you're not familiar, Digg and competitors like Reddit and Newsvine are "user-driven social content Web sites" where people, not the news media, democratically decide what's hot and what's not. Users submit and rank news articles, blog postings, videos and other content. "After you submit content, other Digg users read your submission and Digg what they like best," explains Digg. "If your story rocks and receives enough Diggs, it is promoted to the front page for the millions of Digg visitors to see."
Because Digg links back to a story's original source, a coveted front page placement not only reaches millions of eyeballs, it can drive a tsunami of traffic back to your Web site. This recent analysis of several Digg-ranked stories from CyberNet News demonstrates the impact the "Digg effect" can have.
While legions of Digg users collectively select the best stories, the Digg community is actually stratified, with a Digg politburo of elite power users whose votes have much larger sway over others. Hence, some would argue, these influencers can be influenced. In fact, some Digg power users are so influential that Digg-rival Netscape recently offered them money to jump ship. And many did.
So it comes as no surprise that clients are starting to ask us what we can do to influence the Digg community or game their chances of having a story Dugg.
"Not a thing" is our first answer. PR should play no role in trying to influence social media networks, especially tricks like Digg It spamming, ballot stuffing, voting bots and direct outreach to specific power users. It offends the entire concept of community-generated content. While some agencies may partake in the schemes, much like the way some PR practitioners misrepresented themselves on blogs in the early days of "blog relations," they and their client will eventually get burned.
That said, our follow-up answer is "Well, there are a couple things you can do."
First, generate worthy content. If you've got a good story, invest the time and effort in being creative, writing it well, and letting the story rise or fall on its own merits.
Second, make it easy for others to "Digg" your story. This can be accomplished simply by providing submission links for Digg, Reddit, etc. on all news releases, Web site articles, blog postings, downloadable PDFs, podcasts, videoblogs, etc. If the story has merit and the reader Diggs it, a split-second single-click decision is all it takes to make your story a front page contender. Instructions for how to integrate "Submit to Digg" links into your Web site and documents is found here.
On the flip side, Digg and the other social news aggregators can be great tools in keeping you on top of the lastest buzz and hot news exploding virally across the social media world. The traditional news media watches and is influenced by these grassroots trends. You may find opportunities to get out in front of one of these breaking stories for PR and marketing purposes.
We recommend at a minimum using one of the social media monitoring services like PopUrls to create a customizable dashboard that combines all your favorite social news sites in one place.
Other recommended cool tools are Digg's Diggspy, which provides a real-time snapshot of all Digg activity to see what others are Digging, submitting, commenting on, or reporting, and Diggcloud, a visual way to browse hot stories using a heatmap model.
- Steve Hodgdon, SVP Digital & Social Media
