Digging for PR Juice on Digg? Don't

Om Malik says that spammers are abusing community-edited sites such as del.icio.us and Reddit. Basically they submit spam links and use bots to increase the votes to their stories. Although most PR professionals are not nearly as nefarious, it occurs to me that there could be some who are tempted to seed news release and media coverage links to high-traffic sites like digg in an effort to juice up their results. Well, that's like Sammy Sosa swinging a corked bat.

The best advice I can offer here is don't go digging for PR gold here. Digg, Reddit, del.icio.us and other collaborative news sites are like Bengal Tigers. They're beautiful to look at and admire, but they're very dangerous to touch. If your stories end up landing on these sites, then terrific. Be happy. Include the metrics in your coverage reports. But seeding PR links is trouble waiting to happen, especially as these communities become barraged with spam and the users' sensitivity meter goes to code red.