There are many reasons the Digg Community may perceive you negatively, or worse yet, consider you a filthy social media spammer. If you take part in the majority of these activities you probably aren’t seen as a positive social media maven as you may have hoped. Instead your actions depict you as a whiney and needy nuisance.

You might be a Digg Spammer If:

1. Your only shot at glory is to slightly rip of a top digger’s icon so you might get a few extra diggs

2. Your icon is a busty woman, but you are an out of shape male

3. You have over 400 “friends”

4. You only shout with one of these sayings: “shouting for a friend,” “sharing for a friend,” or “for a friend”

On Monday, I’ll be presenting at Search Engine Strategies San Jose on Igniting Viral Campaigns:

In a world dominated by behemoths like bud.tv, MySpace, and YouTube, how do mid-sized and smaller companies break through to generate online destinations that create buzz, encourage word of mouth and establish relationships with potential buyers? This session unveils the secrets of Web 2.0 techniques and technologies that enable companies to stand out and be talked about.

I’m going to focus on an overview of social media marketing and especially how you can leverage social media news & bookmarking sites to make your campaigns take off. The sessions is aimed at small to mid-sized business owners and is a must attend for anyone doing viral marketing. If you’re going to be at SES - I’d really suggest making it to this 11:15am session on Monday morning. I’ll also be joined by Jennifer Laycock, Justilien Gaspard, Fionn Downhill and it will all be moderated by Andrew Goodman.

Modern blog platforms, like Wordpress, make it easy for anyone to write content for a website without much knowledge of HTML or CSS. You can simply use a WYSIWYG (the Visual part to HTML/CSS code) editor. It is definitely a great way for non-technical people to write and format content. Here are a few tips that will help you stylize and format your content, so that your posts really draw attention:

Image Sizing and Positioning

It’s no secret that images are an essential part of making a post interesting and visually stimulating. Patrick Winfield wrote an extensive post about finding images online.

After finding your image, it is important to resize it to fit your post. Here is an example of a guy who has some technophobia:

Contests, especially user-generated ones, have the ability to drive significant traffic and links to a site. For example, there are many sites like Contest Hound and Contest Blogger, that share information about various available contests. Many participants connect with contest for the following reasons:

• Win a prize (monetary or material)
  
• Recognition
• Connect with the brand
  

In order for people to connect with a contest, the concept needs to be relevant to the target audience’s interests. Issue-based organizations have been extremely successful at drawing many participants and encouraging feedback, regardless of the prize. However, consumer goods struggle with contests, especially if the rewards are nominal.

Wells Fargo, the financial services company, is offering a contest that encourages users to submit a story of what they would accomplish if they had a certain amount of money. Some Day Stories is rewarding the winner with $100,000.

R U a Digg n00b that gets pwned by 1337 Digg Commenters? Well RTFM so teh next time ur comment won’t be an EPIC FAIL!

On Digg, having something to say is only half the battle, knowing how to say it is the other half. This guides you to dissect the jargon, people and memes used in comments on a daily basis. Each section is broken down in detail to help you boost your Digg cred the next time that you leave a comment.

3G - Third Generation of mobile phone standards and technology

AMD - Advanced Micro Devices (mainly a CPU competitor to Intel)

API - Application Programming Interface

APOD – Astronomy Picture of the Day (link)

BS – Bullsh*t

CCTV - Closed-circuit television (UK public surveillance)

CCFL - Cold Cathode Fluorescent Lamps (Modern light bulb that uses a fraction of the electricity of regular light bulb)

Have you ever wondered how videos show up in web search engine results? How do videos get hundreds of thousands to millions of views on YouTube? Who’s watching my videos? Well, with a little hard work on optimizing and networking your video content and a helpful tool called YouTube Insight, you can be on your way to working with video and optimizing it for real business results.

YouTube Insight is a handy analytics tool that displays statistics for YouTube Videos. By using Insight you’ll discover statistics such as:

• how many views your video has over specific periods of time,
• the demographic and geographic breakouts of the views and
• how people are finding the video content (web search, YouTube search, embed, etc…)

Though Insight’s data is not always 100% accurate (YouTube states this when you are working with it) and can use some further development in features and functionality, it’s a great start to gaining “insight” to this ever so important media.

Images are an important way to add that extra kick to your blog posts. They are often the first thing that attracts visitors to read further. But where do you find good image?

After completing your masterpiece, you begin to search endlessly around the internet for an image that depicts the core message of your post. When you finally find that perfect one, it is locked up in licenses and conditions that require a lawyer or a credit card. You are obviously frustrated and find yourself spending more time looking for another image than writing that post. Let’s explore some resources that will help you find that image!

Stock photography sites require a paid subscription and offer many choices and sometimes the best results. It can also be the most played out, overused, politically correct looking fluff out there. However, there are so many sources available, from the super expensive sites like Getty, to the middle of the road places like Shutter Stock and iStockPhoto.

Fresh news is a fundamental element of social media and can be used in a variety of different ways to one’s advantage.

Across virtually every social network site, users scramble to be the first to break a news story. Inevitably, this leads to hundreds of duplicate story submissions and ends with one winner amongst hundreds of losers. But even if you weren’t the Woodward & Bernstein who successfully broke the story, there’s still hope. Remember, the story isn’t over once the news breaks; indeed, in many cases, it’s just beginning.

Taking a step back, a story that is ‘breaking news’ material is news for many different reasons. Every popular news event has multiple angles and subplots that make the story newsworthy for different individuals. For instance, the Boston Celtics recently beat the L.A. Lakers in the 2008 NBA Finals. Why is this news?

Yesterday I presented at SES Toronto along with Lee Odden and Dave Snyder on a panel called ‘Twitter: Ultimate Time Waster, or Great Tool?’ I figured that in order to show how Twitter actually works - it would be best to use Twitter to do it. Here’s the results of the experiment and an extended version of my presentation. Also if you’re on Twitter and would like to follow me - here’s my profile: http://twitter.com/chriswinfield

The Best Way to Learn about Twitter is to Have Twitter Do My Presentation

• Started at 4:45pm EST
• No pre-planning or promotion around it at all
• Final question was asked at 6:04pm EST
• Over 275 answers in less than 90 minutes

OK, so you have a great topic ready to write about and now you need to research it out throughly. Creating an effective linkbait piece, one that actually makes people want to link to it, requires some decent researching skills. There is a ridiculous amount of information online just waiting for you, but some of that information may be just that…ridiculous.

The task then becomes figuring out which is the best to use and which needs to be ignored, when to look somewhere else and where that somewhere else is. Here are some ideas and techniques that can help facilitate your research both on and off the screen.