The Digg Experiment

This blog is a study and experiment. Its purpose is to see how Digg.com has grown from just a mere aggregator of stories and features to something incredibly powerful and the most powerful tool for web 2.0 marketers.

Described in wikipedia as “a community based popularity website with an emphasis on technology” digg allows users to submit stories and waits for other digg users to either “digg”, “bury” or totally ignore the submissions of fellow ‘diggers’ accordingly.

Once a story hits the frontpage of Digg.com, the link that was submitted can expect to be inundated with a flurry of traffic. In addition, bloggers may use the content of the article directly from the source, which in turn, creates an inbound link. In search engine visibility terms, inbound links are seen by search engines such as Google as a good method for judging site popularity. Therefore if a site has many inbound links, it will receive a higher position in Google for its keywords.

However, since the inception of Digg it has turned from an engine for the submission of stories and features to a site where the early registering users rule the roost and have, on occasion, even made it into a competitive play area to display their Digg prowess.  This was demonstrated by two users, muhammed saleem and zaibatsu in their recent race to achieve 1,000 front page Digg submissions.

In addition, SEO marketing companies have twigged that this is the cheapest way to obtain quality inbound links by doing what has been phrased as linkbaiting. This is where marketers work hard to come up with a story, feature or top 10 list that will get the attention of Diggers. Submit the story linking to their clients’ websites and sit back and watch the traffic. A demonstration of this can be found by search Google for “Life Insurance”.

Ranked number 6 for this keyword search is lifeinsure.com. But how did lifeinsure.com achieve this space bringing up the rear to the likes of Metropolitan Life, Prudential and wikipedia? The answer is a well formulate list of 19 things you probably didn’t know about death. This was submitted roughly a year ago and to date has received 1,334 diggs and has been blogged by numerous diggers since. A prime case study for online marketers. By the way this was submitted by webtickle. A Digg user who joined on March 15th, 2006. Was this clever marketing or manipulating the system? Or perhaps a bit of both.

However, when user supernova17 was approached by marketing companies to do the same, he was booted out of Digg until he apologized and promised never to do it again, back in 2006.

Who made this differentiation?

With that said, in all honesty, I had never heard of Digg until I attended a seminar in New York hosted by SMX, back in September (2007).  Apart from the uncomfortable chairs (I was unable to sit down for 2 days following the event) it was enlightening and at times, fascinating.

At the conference, Digg.com seemed to be the repeat topic and the main goal for online marketers and bloggers alike. Tamar Weinberg, a Digg ‘power’ user presented a strong solid case for becoming a Digg user. In addition, this was the first time I heard the term linkbaiting used and it was by Rand Fishkin, owner of seomoz.org. This is where I also heard the lifeinsure.com example that was mentioned earlier.

On my return I began to research and signed up as a Digg user on October 25th 2007 under the name theabbaguy. I read and dugg, read and dugg and then read and dugg some more. While reading and digging I made comments on the stories that caught my eye. One of the best features that I read was submitted by geekchic and was titled “How To Become A Digg Power User In Only 48 Hours”. I wondered if it could really be true and if so, how without being accused of spamming. I began to add friends based on the articles I read. However, my email inbox became a minefield of shouts, requesting that I Digg my new found friends submissions.

It made me wonder as to the quality of the articles listed on the front page, if someone has a high number of friends, submits an article and asks the friends to Digg the article.

Following the advice given by Tamar Weinberg which included making yourself indentifiable, providing bio information, befriending users and digging their stories in the upcoming section of Digg and commenting together with the advice given in the above mentioned submission by geekchic, I decided to start submitting.

After my 6th submission, I decided to make my 7th count. My 7th submission became popular (a term associated with making the front page on Digg.com) on November 14th. This was totally by accident. To find out how this made the front page and why it was an accident, please click here.