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The Digging Debate: Is Social Media Worthless?Jan 24 2007 | Social Networks |
There’s a big debate in the blogosphere about long term effects (if any) related to being Dugg. Kim Krause Berg, who recently posted a ton of useful links relating to web design, had her post hit the Digg main page. 
From the exposure, her blog got 28,000 new hits. Her reaction? Not very positive. Kim has gone on to write that the Digg effect is a “quick marketing sugar high,” because the traffic appears to be short-term. She references Matt Bailey’s review of social media where he writes that “social media site links consistently yielded the lowest rates of engagement and no conversions.”
I am reminded about a post made not so long ago by Darren Rowse of Problogger who addressed this concern as well. After evaluating the traffic before and after the Digg effect, he speculated that the Digg effect does have long-term benefits, though nothing that can consistently match the spike from being featured on the main page of such sites. Benefits include:
- New RSS subscribers
- New newsletter subscribers
- Blogs about your blog post (hmm, what’s this post about?)
- And… subsequent Digg exposure (for all of the above — again)
Greywolf then experimented by creating a viral campaign and showed how this is indeed possible: “each successive viral effort compounds and builds [the] previous one.” Andy Beal confirms this in Kim’s comments: “But, here’s the trend. After each digg effect, my long-term traffic increases. Also, those diggers do tend to come back and often digg you again.”
Should you deemphasize the value of this system? It’s a lot about understanding the demographic of the sites you submit to. The exposure may not necessarily generate positive feedback (as in the comments at Digg, which may not necessarily be something the author wants to hear), but regardless, the word of mouth is exceptionally valuable. As Brian Clark writes, “First and foremost, Digg is a community. Despite the broadening of categories, there’s a certain demographic that resides at Digg that you need to understand and work with. If you can speak to them, you win. It’s just like any other marketing.”
And marketing it is. But as Digg clones are predicted to evolve into different verticals, perhaps we don’t have to learn to speak directly to Digg, a community that assumes every blog post comes from a male (did anyone else notice the references to Kim as a guy in the comments?). There will be others. But for those who value traffic even if for a short while, despite the negative aspects of the community, this is a great way to become known.
Posted by Tamar Weinberg at 1:48 pm
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January 24th, 2007 at 2:55 pm
My new site has barely used any medium other than purely social. I have not launched a single link campaign or used any type of link bait or other forms of current tricks for links.
What i did is spend the time hitting all the social sites and getting involved.
I found that after a front page story i would receive an almost doubled normal daily traffic for about 3 to 4 days after the main hits of the initial front page day.
After the week i would see a significat increase in my daily visitor count.
So when i first started i was happy to get about 300 a day on the site and after the first digg and other social front page articles i found an increase to about 500 a day in traffic.. Since then about a month later i now have a minimum of no less than 1000 visits on my worst day and about 4000 to 6000 on a decent day without any front page articles.
I have also seen the amount of quality inbound links i have received from the articles. I receive about 3 times as many links inbound to the site after a front page article than i do normal days.
I think the point is that the traffic on Digg or another social site is no differant in my opinion than the same traffic you get from search engines. The only differance is that they are not quite as defined in their visiting purpose.
But if you increase your incoming visit count by 10 times your normal those people are the same people that would normally link to you and repost your article anyhow. They just come in a much higher number.
So to think that having those people come through your site would not result in a positive outcome is rediculous.
If your site is crap and you have no content then you will not have the outcome that you desire just because you used a social network for traffic.
Just as if you did this with a search engine it is still your responsibility to provide something for your visitors to want to return or purchase in order to succeed.
Sorry i kinda went off on that.. prolly my longest comment on a blog ever.
January 24th, 2007 at 3:31 pm
Well, yes! I did
That was when I realized nobody was reading MY blog or MY archives, or visiting MY other websites, all of which are clearly labeled on my blog. Nor did they visit my bio or About pages, where my picture is.
And when I did leave a comment to the Digg commenters, they STILL didn’t figure it out, LOL. That 28,000 was in the first 14 hours of being dugg, btw. Sure-fire way to give me a heart attack is to see traffic like that show up when you don’t expect it.
January 24th, 2007 at 6:20 pm
Short answer: NO WAY. To me it is very, very valuable when leveraged properly. Both long term and short..
January 24th, 2007 at 11:41 pm
I have to agree with Brent, so what if most don’t stick, it’s better than nothing. But in Brent’s case (if he’s talking about Weird Asia News) his site has a more universal appeal, everybody’s into weird, so more will stick.
But for most everything else Chris hit the nail on the head when he said “leveraged properly”. Quick traffic is one thing, keeping those visitors around or coming back, quite another.
January 25th, 2007 at 1:22 pm
Did anyone mention the viral capacity to forward a Digg story to eight of your friends, and invite them to view that spot on Digg - then link out to that site?
To me, the email function in Digg is key and is really and truly valuable. Digg grows its community and the stories go viral - beyond Digg. It’s extremely powerful.
I can’t begin to list the amount of websites and stories that I have visited that I would NEVER have found through search; “little-guy” sites and blogs with strong, relevant and interesting content. To boot - I forwarded that information on to 8 friends outside of the Digg community!
January 25th, 2007 at 1:59 pm
I have another question. Will it become worthless? Any system that is too easily manipulated ceases to become an effective system.
Given the number of guides to gaming Digg and Netscape, how long before everyone realizes that the systems aren’t functioning as designed?
Additionally, this week I’ve heard a number of comments from teens that lead me to believe that they aren’t as big a part of the ’social media’ boom as we’d like to think.
They’re ‘connected’, but to each other, with cell phones, and the Web is sometimes viewed as a necessary evil. So two years from now will we be talking about the ‘cell phone media’ boom?