Digg and Social Marketing Issues

According to Michael Grey’s article How To Be A Dirty Digger:

1. A snappy title can mean the difference between making the homepage and getting half a dozen votes and fading into oblivion. When your competition publishes a new blog post, do them a favor and submit it on their behalf with click poison all over it like ‘cool new idea’ or ‘Good post on www.example.com’

2. Get a disposable email, preferably something like competitiorname@hotmail.com.

3. Go to your local library or internet cafe set up 15 or so accounts on the same IP and ’self vote’ for stories from your competiton’s url.

4. Make sure you bury a story as soon as possible.

5. Set up another sock puppet account and narc on yourself.

Michael states, “The reason all of this works is that despite being a web 2.0 company Digg and Netscape are still in Spam 1.0 mentality. The biggest problem is Google has grown up the black operations spammers so much that they are sophisticated enough to make a web assassination look like spamming self suicide.”

So what’s the reason for citing this blog? Chris Lang on his social marketing blog, posted a message over at SMC from his blog on How To Get More Diggs and he posted another message to White Hat Black Belts called Digg shouts, beneficial in your Digg profile or links to spam?, in both of these articles he examines something I call “The Digg Phenomena”. In those messages he shares with us some insightful views and information which he learned about Digg over the past couple weeks and he posts his concerns over Google picking up on shouts set to private on Digg through the History tab. Chris says:

“We all know you should not continually submit or Digg your own content.

But even though you set your Digg settings to not show your shouts it does show under your history tab in your public profile.

Okay, so if you are shouting “Digg this” and a link to a Digg item that is from your site or blog and Google can see this in your public profile is Google discounting this Digg item or the article on the parent site?”

I concur with Chris, one should never continually submit or “Digg” their own content, however I think it might be useful for him to tell people what he means by “Digg your own content” for I’ve seen one or two people ask this question. Chris explained this to me before, so I already have an idea of what he means.

I also am concerned about everyone seeing my private shouts by circumventing the privacy settings which Digg provides by going straight to the History tab. To me that seems like an “Oh-oh” made by the programmers at Digg. Oh well, I can’t fault them, if they made a mistake or two… it shows they are human! J

Additionally I tend to think along the same lines as Chris, if we can see those shouts… then so can Google. The difference is that we may ignore those shouts, but does Google? This is indeed a concern if you wish to maintain high rankings at Google. .

Chris also made a comment about “Duplicate Content” which started me thinking. I know from observations made over my life time that there are often two types of definitions for words and terminology.

The first type is the definitions we find in Dictionaries and through other sources which gives the most common definitions. This type of definition we can easily look up and say “Ah, so that is what that means!”.

The second type of definition are what I call “Personal Definitions”. Quite often people will alter a true definition, for reasons good or bad, and sometimes those definitions vary slightly from the true meaning… however other times those definitions can vary greatly. Let’s apply this explanation to “Duplicate Content”.

To one person, Duplicate Content may mean an exact copy of another’s submission. In their view the Title has to be the exact same, the message body has to be the exact same and the links provided have to all be the same. To another, they may be more lenient… yet still strict. They may think that Duplicate Content is something contains 80% or more of the same content. Then you have those that think a person can post similar submissions and have lower amounts of the same content.

If you follow what I am saying, what constitutes Duplicate Content? At what point are like submissions considered as duplicate? I can get pretty picky, if I chose to do so, and if I decided I could probably knock out 80% of the submissions posted to Digg, maybe more. To do such a thing would only serve to anger the masses, but I am positive I could justify deleting 80% of all the submissions posted there with relative ease.

This whole series of discussions have began to makes me wonder if some forces cannot be in play which are are not considering. Is it possible that some of the things which Greywolf stated in his blog are behind some of these anomalies over at Digg? I’ll have to give that more thought, but I might never resolve this issue for it is too apparent that Digg changes things from time to time, as does Google.

While reading the posts in Chris’s threads, blog marketing guru Andy Beard offering the following vital information:

“Digg generally hate marketing and SEO articles.”

I have seen some of the things Andy said, actually I mostly heard about the things he said, and I’ve come to respect Andy’s words. I am positive that there is plenty of reason for believing Digg generall hates marketing and SEO articles, it seems to me like they love traffic. SEO and Marketing submittals do not seem to generate a lot of traffic, therefore they may not be high on the list of Digg’s priorities.

So the idea is this… if Digg generally hates Marketing and SEO articles, which includes items taken from Blogs, then is there anything out there which are more fair to those of us who have an interest in such things? If not then how hard will it be to set up such a system to where those in Marketing and SEO gets a fair go?

I am sure I am not the first to think of this, nor will I be the last, what I am sure of is that I don’t think I have the skills or resources to do it. As far as I can see, the idea of utilizing places which are more “Marketing and SEO Friendly” is an extremely logical solution, providing there are such places. Places like SMC and White Hat Black Belts seem as if they are good places to post information about these topics, however I see no way of ranking the information given and I am not 100% convinced that ranking is such a good idea any. Years ago I was on a system where the programmers put in a ranking system and with in the first day it was abused by people who had personal feelings against other people by the giving of poor ratings. This practice would spur many fights and arguments, and it became a way of groups with opposing views irritating their adversaries and even hiding their posts. I wouldn’t want to see that happen on a system like Social Authority @ Ning which seems like a good place to be for learning and exchanging ideas.

I hope no one misunderstands me, I like Digg.. I think it’s a pretty cool place and it can be fun. I have no real problems with it, however my like for something has never made me blind to the pros and cons of it. I realize that some of the things I’ve said were not exactly what many of the people talking of this were thinking… but this is my blog and I felt I had to incorporate something new or different. My purpose isn’t to put down Digg, or promote things other than Digg. Even if there was some other way, I’d still support Digg by going their and submitting things about SEO, Marketing and City Social Marketing.