At the 37 Signals blog, Matt is discussing the efficacy of having buttons for Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, etc. listed on the bottom of article pages or blog posts. Here's what he had to say:
Given the Ebola-like spread of these things they must be really effective, right? Not so much. Zero out of Technorati’s top 10 blogs feature those icons. And only two out of the 15 entries in the current crop at Digg’s Top Today page offer “Digg me” icons.
This focus on campaigning over content seems like a classic case of misplaced priorities. The reason posts wind up at Digg, Delicious, or elsewhere isn’t because the authors made it easier to vote for them (it’s already easy). A post winds up at these sites because people respond to its content and quality.
To me, his post is generally awful. The examples he uses to back up his assertion (that those buttons are ineffective) are overly narrow and show no real data supporting or rejecting the assesment. His primary issue with the buttons focuses on the "priorities" of the site owners using them. In essence, he argues that you can either you spend your time placing social bookmarking buttons on the bottom of your pages OR build great content. This is utter nonsense - if you ask for the 15-minute feature addition of social buttons to your blog template from a developer, you are not cutting into content-development time.
This is not to say that the point Matt brought up isn't valid - it absolutely is. He just did a terrible job of phrasing the issue. I would contend that adding those bookmarks to the bottom of pages has both positives and negatives.
Positives
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You make it easier for your visitors to bookmark/tag/submit/vote on your content
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You help to suggest that performing those social actions is desired
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You make it clear that you're a fan/supporter/devotee of those sites
Negatives
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You're potentially turning off audiences who feel that the buttons are too self-promotional
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Having the buttons on every page could reduce the value of placing them on certain pages on occassion by giving your readers "button blinders" (similar to ad blinders)
The 51 comments in Matt's post generally agree with his assertion, but I don't. Despite the potential negative stigma that a select few might attach to seeing the buttons, I personally do use them on other people's sites (particularly the del.icio.us button) and feel that as long as they're well-integrated into the site's layout, they're more of a potential positive than a negative.
I had a similar discussion with our CTO just the other day. In my longing for our client sites to have a greater tendency towards web 2.0, I introduced a small assortment of buttons to some client sites with robust and rich media influenced PR pages. Most of our client sites are conversion focused either via download or e-commerce. The CTO seeing the increased popularity of new Press Releases got it in his mind to add buttons to each and every page, even those in a tailored conversion funnel. Seeing this as a technology and development issue and not related to marketing, he took it upon himself to craft a spec and reschedule a release to include dynamically these buttons on all of our client sites. Luckily I was on the list for this spec and could kill it before it killed conversion rates. I think they should add some kind of surgeon generals warning on most of these tags warning about the risks of creating new exit points on commerce pages. I live for link bait, but not at the cost of conversions. I'll have to remember this when reviews come around again. Does anyone know of any studies on the effects of adding buttons to e-commerce pages? Sounds like theme for a future MarketingSherpa book. See you in Vegas.
Wow, this is a great use of an onclick event, especially for a company that is not using FeedFlares i.e. they are really your own tags. And then you can do one of your great statistical pieces on how often people clicked on the delicious and digg buttons and show how well it correlated to the number of diggs/delicious entries. There might be timing issues too, did the post take off (in Digg/delicious) based on the tag clicking?
Rand - It's serendipidous you posted this today. Check out the email I sent you on Monday :)
Your points are excellent. In Blue Dot's case, I would add another positive which is "allow existing readers to extend your content to their social networks".
Curious if you think this fits in with how others are thinking about it?
I'll Digg articles I like if it's easy.
For me... The buttons are a visual indicator that the blogger appreciates that kind of attention.
Once and I while I'll leave a comment like "Wow! Great Article!" and the webmaster will sometimes send me an email to say thanks for the great comment and then ask if I can help promote the article to others with a vote on Digg or whatever.
If someone leaves a comment or Diggs your article, why not reach out to them and try to establish a better relationship?
I'd also like to add that although people who already use these sites will probably have a bookmarklet or something, adding the links or icons to your site helps to target those people who don't yet use those sites. A regular visitor to your site might see the icons, wonder what they mean, visit the sites, sign up, and click your icons next time they visit. So you get more traffic by encouraging people who don't already use social bookmarking sites to start using them (and to use them on your content.)
I think that the value of these buttons depends upon the type of people who visit your website. I placed RSS and XML buttons at the top of my main navigation and showed them to a million visitors. That got about 100 subscribers who now give me about 30 clickthroughs per day. Pretty low percentage, right?
Now, consider one thing. My feeds have been picked up by topix.net and traffic from them can be astounding when I have a popular posting.
So, maybe my initial shot at this misses the mark, but I am killing a different target with a ricochet.
Get that friggin' smoke out of your mouth Expertu! =P
I have removed all social media marketing from my personal blogs, it attracts the wrong type of traffic.
If I was blogging for attention/business like other SEO's are, sure, why not do all you can to get a little more traffic...
if they help, good. if they get in the way, bad.
Testing testing...
if this is bold
Happens to my blog comments all the time :\
--- Update: Test successful
When somebody writes something in bold, in my blog comments, and obviously this one, the remaining comments also become bold. Either the commenter forgot to close the b tag or the blog added a b tag
I agree with your post and Matt's at Signal v. Noise, actually. At least to some extent.
Matt's right that the implementation of most of these social bookmarking icons is horrible. They're a waste of space, serve little purpose, and are rarely noticed and therefor rarely used.
I responded to both of your entries and went on about how to do the social bookmarking thing on blogs in a way that will actually work.
Rand,
I agree with your point here; his methodology is flawed at best, and just because the guys at the top (who already have the traffic) don't do it doesn't mean that the other 99.999999% of the bloggers shouldn't. You need to promote yourself anyway you can, and those links aren't going to make much difference if your content is no good.
Speaking of blatent self-promotion, I launched a site recently called MegaKarma.net which can also be of assistance in promoting your articles on the social bookmarking sites. Basically, it emails your submitted articles around to our growing user base and asks them to submit a vote. I encourage you (and your readers) to check it out and make suggestions. It's totally free and there aren't even any ads.
-Joe
AddThis.com has a service for this that enables webmasters to track how many time their sites have been bookmarked.
https://www.addthis.com/demo.html
Removing choices or making choices for site visitors are two things that communicate a message. It's easily assumed that everyone has good eyesight, can use a mouse, or understands what buttons are for. Forcing someone to open up a new browser and type in a new URL are added steps someone with MS or carpal tunnel want to avoid.
My teenager is a demographic that's interesting to watch. They love buttons. They're lazy as heck and seek out shortcuts.
I put the slew of buttons on a separate page because I found the grouping to be an eyesore. I left one, for easy Diggs and one for Feedburner, whereby one click offers choices to the end user.
I could test the crap out of this decision or simply live with myself knowning I've tried to achieve something fair and balanced for those who come to my blog. It's what they expect from me. The message I want to send is that I care about their experience.
What do your visitors expect from you and more importantly, how much does a site owner care about the difference between self pleasure or visitor satisfaction?
Ok rand, I'll give you an argument.
Anyone savvy enough to use digg/del.icio.us/crap.tacul.ar already has a bookmarklet or the ability to type in www.digg.com. People only save a small percentage of the stuff they see, so if they go through the thought process of "hey, this is good, i want to save it" then it's not a ton of work to use their bookmarklet.
Here's another way to put it: it's visual noise for 98% of your users, and the 2% who can use it already have other ways.
Stuff that gets dugg (and gets good traffic) has at least a decent intro/summary, so if they're willing to write that, then believe me, they can type in www.digg.com instead of using the 99.9%-of-the-time-irrelevant icon.
So - the question here is, are you turning off people more than you're getting value from them. I don't use the print buttons on most article sites, but they don't bother me - nor do the RSS buttons or the add comment buttons or the "email a friend" links even though a very small percent of readers use those features.
Most of the navigation and features of a website will be used very infrequently - this doesn't mean it's a bad feature. As long as it's useful to the site and useful to some percentage of the audience, without interfering with the rest, it's adding value, not removing it.
Granted - there's a balance to be had, but I still think the argument you make is somewhat weak. To me, the only real strong argument against is that you could be perceived as needy or spammy by folks who might otherwise give you a tag/Digg/bookmark/etc.
I disagree 100%. These icons are useless. See my rant.
The key to disagreeing intelligently is to make arguments, provide a hypothesis and show evidence. Simply saying something is so doesn't make it that way.
I actually kind of agree with Matt. I personally never click on any of the social bookmarking icons that are at the bottom of posts. I think they make the page look very cluttered and they seem to plea for attention. If content is truly valuable it should be socially bookmarked on its own. I have a few select social bookmarking sites that I use and my methods of submitting to those sites are already very streamlined (delicious and stumbleupon toolbars).
I will say, however, that having a live digg button is valuable simply because it's very convenient to click on it and not have to leave the page to digg something. If Digg had a toolbar, which they don't (AFAIK), I'd probably be inclined to use that instead.
I agree with you. Point.
For the last two years the focus of my work has been online marketing. It's not (in my case) about wanting to avoid marketing - it's about wanting to market my site and the sites I operate in the best possible way. I believe that the potential benefit from adding buttons like these is outweighed by the potential damage done by adding them.
It is easy to make a case for enabling users to more easily bookmark something. That doesn't make it a good idea. If it were difficult to bookmark something with these services, then the buttons would be a necessity. But the people who use them know how to bookmark and most likely use the bookmarklets. If you give them a button they'll probably use it - but that doesn't mean that without the button those same people wouldn't have bookmarked.
On a related note, I wonder how long it'll be before someone comes up with a "meta bookmark" service - something to allow people to click a single link to send a fully tagged and described bookmark to all of their favourite social bookmarking sites.
Buttons, buttons, where are the buttons? Really Rand for all this talk about buttons, where are your buttons?
Of course most of the Cutletts are going to agree with Matt, what else do you expect? I've seen Cutletts and you sir are no Cutlett. In fact you're not even a button guy.
David - this is Matt Linderman from 37 Signals. Or maybe you're being tongue-in-cheek and I'm just out of sorts...
The blog has links to digg and delicious links at the bottom of each post...
Yes, Rand,tongue-in-cheek, maybe not so obvious. WeRAskitzzo, thanks. I think this is a a great way to avoid "button blindness" and an excellent non intrusive way to accomplish the task.
The very nature of these icons mean they best support smaller sites that are still trying to make a name for themselves.
Also, Digg/Technorati traffic does not only come from appearing top of the list. Every extra visitor is important.
That's sometimes true, but have you seen the ridiculous numbers of these things people are adding to their sites now? I've seen 40+ at the bottom of articles on occasion.
This is in turn going to have a negative effect for some people ("Why isn't my bookmarking service listed here?"), and even those people who are listed aren't going to want to have to hunt through a mess of tiny icons to bookmark something.
I don't think they're particularly effective either. They look like a cry for attention to me. Pleading for someone to tell others of a post regardless of the quality of the post would seem (to me at least) to be intuitively counterproductive. Maybe you get one or two more extra bookmarks for a single post, but how many readers will you lose in the process?
I agree with you totally on this one. The amount of time it took me to add a social bookmarking toolbar to my site (about 3 hours) didn't detract in the slightest from the quality of my content(as good or bad as it may be).
Also, my 'Digg this' icons only show up on the posts that have actually been Dugg thanks to Avirans Digg this Wordpress plugin which gets around point 2 of your negatives.
Personally, I like it when someone allows me to add a page I like to Google Bookmarks straight from the post. Its convenient and quick. If the social bookmarking toolbar is designed well and is reasonably unobtrusive then I think its a great feature that both parties (visitor and site owner) benefit from.
These buttons can also offer your visitors the chance to vote for you, so you won't rely only on digg users. If you have at least 200-300 visitors per article, 2-3-4% will convert in a digg.
I see this buttons mostly as a reminder to bookmark/tag/submit/vote this site. Furthermore I like to advertise those social pages in Germany. It would make linkbaiting a whole lot easier in Germany, if such social sites were more successful.
I agree with most of your points, but I don´t think that someone could see this buttons as to self-promotional?
Rand,
I'm with you on this issue. I also use these buttons often, and I am sure other people do as well. So that fact alone makes it worth the time it takes to implement them. Even if they get you just one or two more diggs and del.icio.us bookmarks per post than you otherwise would have it would be worth it in the long run. Not everyone may agree, but doing a quick cost-benefit assessment, it looks to me that the Pros outweigh the cons since the cost/effort of implementing such icons is almost negligible.
Matt's logic is a bit faulty. Saying that "Zero out of Technorati’s top 10 blogs feature those icons" tells us nothing about the icons' effectiveness. Just because the top blogs don't use these icons doesn't mean it doesn't help the blogs that do. Every blog is unique and has many different reasons for their success. Social icons are only a small factor, but they may still have an effect. You could tell me the top 1,000 blogs don't use these icons and it wouldn't sway my opinion about this.
Also, merited or not I respect sites that use the social bookmarks more than other site because it show that they are aware of social media and its importance. It adds a bit of credibility to the site in my eyes.
I would definitely agree they need to be there. I don't think hindering your opportunity to be bookmarked is advisable. OK, some of the top bookmarked items dont have the buttons present but you can rest assured a good percentage of the index will have come from pages that do. (especially in our industry!)
If people don't use them then no harm done but if 10% do, whats the point in not having them! I would keep it to 4, say Digg, Furl, Del.ico.us and reddit and then see how it goes.
I believe the bookmark links are valuable to both the blog owner and the reader. However, they can get a little out of control, which is why I went with a drop-down menu on my new blog design. Same benefit, less clutter.
I agree that the drop down menu is a good way to go.
Rand, I agree with you with the fact that there are both positives and negatives. While the social bookmarking buttons make it easier for your visitors to bookmark/tag/submit/vote on your content it still can appear as being too "salesy" or ego inflating.
My blog guy TwisterMC created a nifty tool earlier this year for easily embedding these kinds of links into blogs and/or web pages.
Recently we upgraded to offer a dropdown option so all the user sees is a "Bookmark This" or other customizable text. This kind of tool is ideal for non-techie bloggers as it's copy and paste code.
I agree that there is a "heard mentality" amongst bloggers with the adoption of such tactics. Who can blame them? With so many blogs launching daily, people are always looking for ways to stand out.
Lee, I always wanted to say that that dropdown sucks.
Don't clutter the social links. Don't put 20. Maintain your focus on 4-5 of the main ones, that really make a difference. Make bigger icons, and bigger text links. Icons are really important, because the user associates he's favourite bookmarking or social news website, with the icon.
You're such a troublemaker Chris! :) The collection I have in the drop down on my blog is a bit much I'll admit. It's the original list Thomas put there to show me how it would work. I never reduced it.
However, I do list icons for Digg, Del.icio.us and Reddit to draw more attention to them and as time goes on am thinking of just showing those three or maybe 4. I think it's useful to give the user options and I'm sticking by that choice. :)
Lee - that tool you linked to is pretty killer. You can select which services you want to offer and it creates the drop-down for you. I'm a fan.
Thanks Rand. Coming from you that's a huge compliment which I will pass to Thomas aka TwisterMC.
Wait a minute...voting (going to the polls) is easy to do too. It takes an effort to get in the car, do the research and go, but it's still easy.
And yet, we're bombarded with TV and radio commericals reminding us to vote and whom to choose. My phone has recorded messages left on the voice mail every day from political campaigns. There's signs on front lawns and roadways.
All of this is to remind us to vote and influence choice. The way I see it, the tiny buttons on blogs are the same thing. For power users like me who read a ton of material every day, a button comes in handy.
So what if they're reminders and influencers? That's life on the web.
Honestly, I think this is another sign of the disdain many designer types have for marketing and especially for self promotion (I'll be writing about that soon!). I think a few icons can't hurt, and make a subtle suggestion that adding your site would be a good idea.
I don't like it when there are a whole long row of them. Or when I see them on bad content that would never be worth sharing. I also dislike those big digg buttons that show the digg count. That's a bit too much.
These buttons also help spread the word about those sites and social networking in general. Good promotion for the sites themselves. It might give some people the impression that these sites are really cool and a lot of people use them.
>Honestly, I think this is another sign of the disdain many designer types have for marketing and especially for self promotion
DING I think we have a winner!!!!
I've been tracking the usefulness of these buttons on my blogs for a while, and came to the conclusion that about 4-5% of my visitors used these buttons (this was on css3.info, your milage may vary).
After doing that I've seen my general traffic from del.icio.us and other tag sites increased by some 30/40%. What you create by every click on such a button is a recurring visitor, isn't that what we all want?
I'm with ILoveJackDaniels on this one. I'm all for making things easy for a user but the buttons just come across as a form of begging and that leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
I feel so stongly about this that I've removed all instances of those buttons from every site I operate. At first I expected to see less activity from those sources but instead most actually climbed.
If you want some one to do something you a) make it easy for them to do it b) incentivize the behavior.
I also think the sheeple mentality is at work, as people are much more likely to "digg" a story that someone else submitted. Heck I'm even thinking of ways to include them into a feed, since I think publishing full feeds make people less likely to visit the site and actually see the buttons.
Remember there's a reason the church rings it's bell every sunday, it's to remind you it's there, and that you should get your self to church.
>> Heck I'm even thinking of ways to include them into a feed,
Give me an e-mail. I already did that.
SEO Egghead has a nice little hack to put the links into a feed.
You can also do it easily if you use FeedBurner.
Hey Thanks for the info.Great website! My partner and I are always looking for sites like this, ill be sure to share this post.
Regards
Brett