SMO guide part 5 - Digg
Digg, along with its competitor Reddit, is leading the social news revolution on the web. The premise of the site is that users sign up, submit any sort of interesting/amusing/shocking/baffling news story or photo from around the web, and the other users vote for, or “Digg”, the content. The stories with the most “Diggs” get to the front page of the site, which is widely becoming known as one of the most valuable pieces of real estate on the web. Sites that have had stories on the front page of Digg have reported up to 1 million visitors coming from the site.So what does it take to get to the front page of Digg? Well, having useful, interesting and informative content is the place to start. Don’t expect a press release about your new company premises to get many Diggs – the Digg community is notoriously anti-commercial. Anything that is seen to be direct advertising or promotion of a brand will not only be not “Dugg”, but it will also be “buried”, which is the Digg equivalent of voting down. This feature was introduced a few years ago in an attempt to stop spamming of the site, mainly by gangs of people all getting together and Digging each others content.
So to gain social news visibility you have to think of a way of promoting your website, brand or company in a non-commercial way. There’s the rub – this can be extremely difficult, especially if your business is everyday and prosaic. However, it can be done. For example, if you own a mortgage company, how about doing a “Top 10 Unusual Mortgages Piece”? Top 10’s, top 100’s and the like always tend to do well on social sites; they’re a common ploy to get good coverage.
For more inspiration, take the example of Quensland State tourist board in Australia. They came up with what has become known as one of the cleverest and most viral pieces of marketing recently on the web. They advertised a job on one of their plushest island resorts, paying 100,00 dollars a year, for very little work. The job advert caused a storm, crashing their servers due to the amount of people logging on and applying. It also generated millions of dollars of free revenue, as agencies such as CNN, the BBC and Digg picked up the story. The story received nearly a 1000 Diggs, which propelled it to the front page, giving it serious traffic from the site.
So if you get those creative juices flowing it is possible to generate some content that appeals to the Digg community. It just takes a bit of thought.
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