Ok... Here's my first grey technique that I attempted last week for one of our site (not to hard to guess which one). Our company was confronted with the following elements:
-Dire need to start growing our community on a young domain and newly started blog
-Virtually no money to spend on it, only precious planned time from actual employees
-No knowledge of any kind for viral marketing but a strong desire to achieve results
-No plugs, no previously built PR relations with any of the major French news platforms (Scoopeo, Fuzz, Nuouz) that are digg-like platforms
-No idea how to make it to the First page fast enough to generate decent results
So we wondered... what do we have to offer to the community? We can offer our core knowledge... But should we share it with everyone or keep that inside the company as "competitive intelligence"?
I think I would never have been invited to this great blog if I would hesitate on questions like this :). Here's what we did to score a good 500-1000 visitors with our 1st attempt and start getting some comments, new subscribers and steady inbound links:
-Bring 20++ reliable and Internet active friends / employees / collaborators into the fold.
-Every time you post a WORTHY comment (I need to insist of the word WORTHY) and you want it to be read by many people, simple paste a link of your post and email it to that 20+ list and gently ask them to go and read your post... and tag it / comment it... (a greyer technique would be to mention that you can vote twice; once being logged and one being unlogged --> I hope they correct this someday and just put plain IP).
-Ensure that your team successfully tag your news fast enough so it goes to the First page
-Tune your team and your posts so they are getting to the First page at a time where there is the highest traffic on the platform
Results: Fast enough, your news will reach the front page... and if the timing is great, you can score thousands of visitors, especially for the American market with Digg. What makes this technique grey is that the "viral marketing team" is a little bit abused, but it's a good start if you got to do some guerilla marketing.
Any thoughts?
I love how upset people get when a method to pull traffic affects social sites like Digg. All of the sudden things get very personal.
Manipulating Digg and similar sites is just another technique that can be utilized and to be quite honest, if you're hoping to create some buzz and traffic, it's a winner.
It's no different than taking steps to affect your ranking in the serps. We use the tools that are available to us.... at least we should.
I'm sorry Cameron but Digg was busted long ago (well 9 months or so - bout 10 in internet years) and Rand posting this technique isn't going to make digg any worse for the wear.
I have to agree that, unfortunately, anything that CAN be gamed WILL be gamed.
Here's my take on the color scheme:
White: digging one's own content once; including "digg this" on one's page Egg-shell white: asking one's friends/family/co-workers/mailing list to add a digg Grey: asking a pre-arranged network of conspirators to add a digg; digging oneself from multiple IPs Black: automating the process - no humans involved.
Personally, I think that the social search systems should focus on preventing the automatic submittals (oh so Black!). There's only so much that human users can do!
Now, why am I so fascinated by these colors? maybe because I'm a painter...
Gradiva Couzin https://www.yourseoplan.com
if you over do it, your account and the article you digg might be disable for a click fraud. ;)
Nothing new... digg whores and clicking scripts are lame. Besides, there are already grey hats team who use this trick.
I'm on board with the -- "let's not destroy social media" crew.
I'd rather see you target a bunch of popular blogs and leave real comments with the commentors URL set to your new site. That's a great way to push traffic on a budget. No comment spam, just use the URL in the profile.
Gaming Digg is more or less easy. It's not clever by any means and it's so common that it won't give you a huge edge. However, it's a decent way to build a few hundred links on the cheap. Just remember that as soon as your story gets buried, which most stories do, you won't have 1000 visitors or 10,000 visitors a day. Your traffic will slowly die off and you'll be back to square one or slighly better off. Don't rely on gaming Digg for much traffic. You are better off using Digg to legitimately announce your blog, product, service etc. and hope for the best. Otherwise, trying to post crappy stuff to Digg will quickly become a waste of time.
Blackbeard, I think you resume it all. That's how I use it too!
But for other languages, this strategy is really great because there isn't that much portals for exposure.
digg bans by IP. I know this, lol. Like that's going to make a difference for determined spammers.
What the world needs to realize (especially investors) is that 99% of 2.0 crap is VERY spammer friendly. (Technorati tags anyone?)
Investors should hire black hatters as consultant before being stupid enough to waste millions on another myspace-but-better
Digg is very aggressive about tracking. I was banned a few months ago because a dozen people from my office all dugg our friends article in the span of five minutes.
They flagged all accounts that logged in from the IP that day.
Tip: make sure you vote only once from your office ;)
Oh well, that's why this is grey :D
If you are against this style of marketing then don't do it. But if the system can be gamed with such a simple technique then it will get gamed.
Appears to be a problem with the system not the user.
You cannnot expect people to follow rules that are NOT or CANNOT be enforced. Plain and simple.
chad
Come on Chad, don't say I only use simple stuff. I like to be recognized as a complex seo guru (sarcasm).
Good comment though :D
If you want to be even greyer (or dark), what about using tor proxy with a wget script. And throw away cookies each time, change your UA according to some evaluation of marketshare (ie: 60% IE6, 20% firefox), etc...
Forget wget...use cURL. It's ideally suited to this sort of automated login-type thing. I've used it from perl scripts to log into Amazon's associate program and fetch sales reports, or add domains to hosting company's online DNS interfaces. It rocks!
I agree with Cameron that this strategy will harm social search communities (more system checks & balances will help this though); however, a variation on the strategy could be just as effective and less abusive. Rather than a list of 20 friends/collaborators, develop a list via your website (a mailing list) of people that are truly interested and connected with the industry... then add "digg this" and "add to my del.icio.us"-type links to your website, and let the links develop naturally.
Personally I feel that a single "digg" for one's own content is OK - but I read in Eric Ward's blog that he thinks even this is pushing it! What does everyone here think?
Gradiva Couzin https://www.yourseoplan.com
I think it's perfectly fine to submit your own story, your single vote alone isn't going to bring it to the homepage... it still takes the power of the community to digg the story to the front page.
Accidentally, I was recently thinking that social bookmarking services could be exploited by just that- building groups of people, or controlled computers on different IPs, to post and vote for the site stories.
Of course, the effect of this depends on the site content, otherwise the people won't recommend it. The site itself has to be truly viral in its nature for it to pick up the speed.
And yes, spam and artificial efforts to promote anything are destroying the social stuff, because social sites are popular because sites are voted for because they are interesting, not because someone wants to make money.
I myself am guilty at submitting one page from my site to Digg. It only generated about 100 visitors, about 70 of which read the page and about 20 of those bookmarked the page. No big deal, but if someone who truly loved the page dug it, it'd be much better.
I support Cameron general state of mind, although we need to look at a couple things here:
-I think tons of articles simply don't make it to the front page because the person who wrote it isn't an authority / known among the community. Just the fact that you can advertize your own post by writing an appealing description makes it weird. -I also realized that most non-branded news hardly make it to the first page, making it difficult for SME's or personal bloggers to get any attention from those social tagging systems (and we don't even talk about results if our website isn't English based... someone made fun of me the first time I posted a French post on digg.com... I felt bad about it and didn't feel I wanted to participate in the website seeing all this hate from the digg community!
-Writing a news to Digg, Scoopeo, Fuzz or any digg-like platform is all about having an attractive title. As we know, an attractive/almost misleading title (which we see very often) do help in getting on Front page -Keep in mind that even if you have your little viral marketing team, if you do write useless / poor content, people are going to "hit and run" from your site, so you won't generate any real benefit for the efforts you put into it.
Guillaume, I agree with some of the points you've just made. I've certainly noticed that it's somewhat of a popularity contest. For example, just about every post that comes from TechCrunch gets dugg to the homepage. I've also noticed that SEM related content rarely ever gets to the homepage, but that's ok, I guess the communty just donesn't care for it.
You make some good points but I ultimately think it's still up to the community as a whole to decide what goes to the homepage, not individuals that employ digg armies, that's what editors are for.
Oh and you're right, it takes thick skin if you want to see your stories on digg. I don't think I've ever seen a story that wasn't flamed in one way or another.
And, caveat or not Marios, whoever reads our articles knew exactly what they were going to read when they clicked on the Title (with no misleading title + a relevant description), and articles with resources to help everyone. I promote a blog which is about sharing the knowledge we have about SEO/SEM/2.0 community for free.
I guess that wouldn't be the same if the blog was a poker site.
I think the last time the Digg community caught wind of such activities, the accounts that were involved were banned. I think you've crossed over the line despite your caveat that the post be "worthy".
I agree with others that a single Digg by you for your own content is as far as you should go. Let the Digg users determine what's good and what isn't without any coaching. If your post is truly worthy, you wouldn't need to ask people to vote.
Issues with Digg is that it mostly push mainstream ideas into the 1st page...
Please don't promote this sort of thing. Nothing will ruin these communities such as digg faster than spamming stories to the homepage that don't belong.