Digg and Social Marketing Strategy

There has been a lot of chatter on various blogs and forums lately about Digg banning domains (a lifetime ban it seems). Some sites have received this response from Digg: "When submitted stories are consistently reported as spam and users complain via our feedback email about submission spam, we ban the domain. The domain will not be unbanned. The domain would consistently get reported as spam otherwise." SoooI thought it would be worthwhile writing a post that looked at social marketing, with a particular focus on Digg. First of all, some background reading if you feel like it:

• Lee Odden - The hypocrisy of Digg and spam
• V7N - URL banned by Digg.com
• Digg - FAQ
The difference between social marketing and SEO I think this is core to the issues facing a lot of sites that have been banned by Digg. An SEO strategy is a very flexible thing. You can take your broad strategy for any site (or page for that matter) and apply it to other sites (or pages). Of course, this is an over simplification - there are obviously differences from industry to industry and site to site, but generally, what works for one site can more or less be applied to another site for similar results. You optimise the same core areas, write content in a similar style and build links from standard sources. It's a very transferable strategy. Social marketing has largely been adopted by the SEO community due to the fact that "buzz" and "viral" campaigns can result in some sweet links, which are great for SEO. But more and more, SEOs are beginning to appreciate the traffic and brand value from this form of marketing - the problem arises when the SEO mindset is applied to this emerging channel of marketing. Simply put - a social marketing campaign needs to be tailored to your specific objectives and although certain aspects are "standard", each strategy isn't as obviously transferable as SEO is. Example 1 - an innocent mistake A blogger who has been banned from Digg had posted on his blog that he had "only" submitted each of his 30 or so articles to Digg once. Not gonna name names at this point because I do think it was an innocent and non-malicious action intended to "seed" the stories on Digg in the hope that they would "grow" in popularity. However if he reads this and doesn't mind being named, I'll happily add in links, etc to his posts. The problem here is not his intention - just the implementation. When devising a social marketing strategy, we need to look at the big picture, particularly when exposing our sites to a large community. As with forums or blog news sites such as Threadwatch, there are different levels of issues and etiquette we need to consider. For Digg, I would make the following assumptions:
• They receive a lot of rubbish submissions
• Most of which probably come from the SEO community (or at the very least, people with a knowledge of SEO)
• As such, the Digg community may frown upon SEO flavoured submissions.
So, in this example, submitting every one of his blog posts, the author has applied a SEO mindset by creating a social marketing strategy that isn't entirely appropriate to meet his objectives. By submitting so many of his own articles, the community system (a combination of human and automated factors) has flagged his domain as spam. The number of submissions as a proportion of the size of his site were so high that Digg has banned his site (as most articles would have been buried). The point here is that not every post made on a blog actually deserves to be added to Digg. Most blogs cover niche topics and in the grand scheme of things, it's unlikely that everything you (or I) write will be "Digg worthy" - remember the community out there is much larger than just SEO. A more appropriate strategy for this type of site (a blog) would be to submit ONLY articles that high quality and are likely to appeal to a broader community, or at the very least just space out your submissions (as submitting an article from your own site as and when you post them could trigger a spam flag). Example 2 - social bookmark buttons on larger sites Another domain that has been banned from Digg is the popular business networking site Del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Furl Bookmark Murdok: Scott Boyd (aka Marketing Guy) is an Edinburgh based online marketing consultant with over 6 years experience in the industry. He is the founder of SEO agency Fused Nation.