Last August we did a post on Voting Rings in Social Networks. At the time there were a number of sites trying to cater to people that wanted to exchange votes with other social network users. The "industry" has changed quite a bit since then, and it bears re-examination.First, let's define what we mean by a vote exchange site. These are websites that allow their users to "trade" t [...]

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What exactly does a social media professional do when they're shepherding a story to the front page of a news site? Aside from all of the other support activities that surround having strong profiles, being an active member in the community, and building off site relationships with as many people as they can, the tactics for getting to the front page really just consist of: Prepare the article. T [...]

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When you get past all the slick used car salesman drivel over at the Warrior Forum, once in a while you can find some real gems.Go read that post. The strategy is pretty simple, but it illustrates how you can use automation to save yourself a lot of time and still use social media the way it was meant to be used. There aren't any scripts or anything even remotely unethical going on, yet he sho [...]

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Most people that talk about strategies for using analytics on Digg and other social networks are after the holy grail of a front page. I think that's misguided.The Front Page Can RockFirst, let's talk about the benefits of a front page.Traffic - A ton of it. A front page on Digg can crush your server. You'll get a ton of people to see your site.Rankings - The scuttlebutt in SEO [...]

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Those of you who have been with us for a while remember the good old days of Digg (last summer) when all you needed was a good greasemonkey script and you could click your way to Digg riches. My have times changed. N [...]

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Before Digg went on its banning rampage, they had a little bug. If you had friended someone that had their account banned, you'd get an error when you clicked on the "remove friend" button in their interface. If one of your friends were banned, you couldn't remove them.That wasn't such a big deal when bannings were few and far between, but with the recent spate of bannings Digg had created a bit of [...]

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We've talked about finding profiles on Digg that have Toolbar PageRank to pass. It's one of the criteria for finding an Interesting Digger. But how many Digg profiles are out there that have positive Toolbar Page Rank?The answer is quite a few, even after you get past the Top 1000 Diggers: Page RankCount 636 526 4361 3906 21,501 11,546 Total4,376 This is based on an [...]

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I can't tell you how many times I've seen messages like this on the profile page of a Digg user:Add me as your friend. I'll digg your shouts if you digg mine. I'm an active digger and I'm always looking for people to reciprocate shares/shouts. Active diggers only please.There's only one small problem with this. Votes from shouts are mostly useless.Votes from your friends are heavily discounted. [...]

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Being a prolific commenter is a key to social media success on any network, but especially on Digg. Aside from being able to expose your great prose to all humanity, there are many excellent reasons you should leave comments on as many stories as you can: Get Seen - Leaving comments gets your name out there. People start to recognize you. If they recognize you, they're more likely to Digg your s [...]

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You can now have a few quick peeks at the new capabilities of our PMS Social Suite! We've put up a few videos on YouTube that walk you through some of the really interesting points. For starters, here is a quick overview of the dashboard:Hot Articles to SubmitThere are a lot of reasons that you want to submit excellent content to social networks, other than just being a good unpaid worker for these sites: Build a Following - Submitting articles that are likely to hit t [...]

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While the sub-prime mortage mess has gotten a lot of press about the excess of sheer idiocy and greed in certain financial institutions, the second great VC funded dotcom bubble has been every bit as crazy and yet receives little coverage. Sure, the amount of money wasted doesn't even remotely approach what's going on in the broader markets, but somehow this business got away from counting revenue and st [...]

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I'm going to propose something rather radical. You should get rid of most of your friends on social media sites that you're targeting to promote your site.We've talked about how you should stop shouting on Digg. But you can take it one step further. Most social media sites now discount the value of a vote from a friend. While they encouraged everybody to build up friend lists through the [...]

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I'm not saying this has happened to you, but if you spend much time at all promoting your site in social media, eventually you're going to need a new ip address. Maybe the 20-something sysadmin was in a bad mood and was feeling the need for a power trip, or maybe you made a mistake and pushed the envelope just a little too far. But getting banned on most social networks means that t [...]

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The latest meme in the Twittersphere has been a complaint about people that use services such as Tweet Later to send automated thank you notes to new followers on Twitter. SocialToo took it so seriously that they dropped that capability from their service. Chris Brogan, Amber Naslund, and Tim Walker have all written on the subject. In fact, probably hundreds of bloggers have written on t [...]

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We are very pleased to announce that Digg and Promote My Site will be partnering to provide Digg's next generation of power user tools. This intiative representsa change in direction for Digg and will be a significiant benefit to the internet marketing community.Kevin Rose may have said "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. In the past we've taken the postion that power users and marketers [...]

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How would you like to add several hundred twitter followers every day, forever? Without adding any additional work to your day? Withoutinstalling any software? Just put it on autopilot and walk away?If that's an interesting proposition, you should read through this entire article.New Twitter LimitsA while back, Twitter published some limits on following people onTwitter. Th [...]

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Are you wasting your days whale watching? No, I don't mean spending time on vacation. I mean that special brand of fun you can only have when Twitter is acting completely out of sorts like it has all afternoon today. Half the time a page load times out. A few times they've even put up the "Twitter is over capacity message" but haven't even served up a fail whale.We're Used to It [...]

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We haven't had too many complaints about our service, but the most frequent complaint we get seems to be "Your software works too well!"A lot of people have been surprised at how many followers they pick up, even with the free trial. The average seems to be about 1,000 new followers over the course of a week. For a few people, this has been enough to decide they don't want any more.The [...]

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I don't know how many times I've said this, but I'll say it again. Don't use Twitter automation on an account that you can't afford to lose. If it's an account that you're personally invested in you shouldn't play with it. Don't bet something you can't afford to lose.With that said, getting suspended on Twitter is not as nearly as common as some people would have you believe. Out of a [...]

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It's not us!  Twitter is currently unable to process follow and unfollow requests. Or perhaps they'll show up after a while. As of this afternoon, if you click follow on someone's profile it will say you're following them, until you click refresh in which case it will say you're not following them. So yeah, our software hasn't added any users for you today. At least it was a computer that found that out instead of you spending your time on it.We [...]

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