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.

Comments

[Joey Marchy]

Steve,
Would you consider "digging" your own blog post just as nefarious as the PR spammers that are trying to game the system?

I thought it would be a good idea to start digging our blog posts as a way of gaining exposure and contributing to the Digg community. Maybe I should back off doing this in favor of others finding and digging the post.

While not necessarily spam, it could be seen by some as trying to game the system.

[Ryan]

A good point, but if one has a story that would be interesting to consumers, as long as it is appropriately transparent, how can that be considered spam when the content is created by a community of which you are a part?

What if you were to bookmark your press releases on a del.icio.us page along with information on a project so that reporters could keep up-to-date? Is that spam?

I'm not really disagreeing with you, but I think the point needs to be expanded upon.

[Jordon Cooper]

Thanks for posting this because del.icio.us spam is clogging up my del.icio.us inbox, one of my most important tools. What I find is that people that are self-promoting their own stuff find themselves blocked from my inbox. Once that happens they no longer exist to people which doesn't help anyone sadly.

[Philipp Lenssen]

It can even backfire when it's someone else submitting a link to your site. Recently, someone submitted a link to a 1-paragraph post of mine where I simply linked to something... one of those Digg submissions where it would have made more sense to link straight to the source of the post (in my case, a new Google service). The story ended up on the Digg frontpage and people started complaining. In a case like that all you can do in terms of damage control is to try to give your article more value by writing an update, and by getting involved in the Digg comments.

[davis freeberg]

This really is great advice Steve. Bengal Tigers is a perfect description. Diggers live for raw meat and believe me we have enough time to find a conspiracy even when one is not there. Give us real controversy and make it about the community and the negative buzz will hurt badly. It's just not a game that you want to play. The upside just isn't worth the downside risk. The more popular these sites get the bigger problem spam will become, but I've found that the collaberative intelligence is pretty good at weeding out the bad actors and focusing on the real stories.

[Constantin Basturea]

So, you're changing your advice about planting "mini memes"?

[TourPro]

Unfortunately my faves Technorati, Del.icio.us, and some others are so filled with spam that they are virtually useless to me for intelligence gathering. I stopped using Del.icio.us for that long ago. For me, the excellent feature of Del.icio.us is the ability to generate a linkroll of tagged content. My obscure tags are likely never found. The only tags I use are my own. Is that improper use?

[Steve Rubel]

Actually, Constantin I back up what I said. What I wrote in 2004 said: "Right now this tactic holds potential, but perhaps at some point it will lose its punch as these sites become a haven for bookmark spam. Enjoy it while you can." The age of innocence is over.

[Mark Billings]

Digg, and digg-like sites offer great free PR to new website owners who may not be able to rank well on Google or Yahoo.

Peruzz.com is one such Digg-like site that is based upon an open-source software package. It is designed to change with the times, with an entire community of developers behind it.

[vas]

There are thousands of digg like sites out there, including www.v0v.com, but nothing comes close to digg. digg is mother of all.