The idea behind Digg is simplicity itself – read an article or post online, like it, let other people know so they can vote on it and watch everyone’s page views skyrocket. The reality has turned out to be a test case in how a social media platform can turn sour. For marketers and others who want to promote content, it may already be time to pack it up and move on to a new platform.
We did some Digg promotion in the past for SearchViews but the number of people required to get anything to really go viral never equaled the effort we had to put in. Recently a colleague asked me why I don’t do more Digg promotion of posts again and I simply said, “Why bother.”
To really make it work I would have to build up a network of tens if not hundreds of folks, probably through mutual story digging. This chain digging is what drives most of the top Digg submissions these days. As my grandmother used to say “Who has the time?” It helps to picture a little old lady shrugging her shoulders.
More to the point, as cadres of mutual backscratchers have overrun Digg’s system, the true value of getting anywhere other than the top 5 highlighted slots diminishes exponentially.
This is already affecting Digg’s business model – today they announced a layoff of 8 workers or 10% of their small workforce. Growth has leveled out and more tellingly media (Reprise and otherwise) darling Twitter has surpassed Digg in users.
This last point is an important one, and not just because we can barely let a single post go by at SearchViews without mentioning Twitter in some way, shape or form. Twitter is proving to be an equally adept platform for disseminating content and so far at least hasn’t been susceptible to people trying to game the system.
I think a big factor in why Twitter has become a more useful platform than Digg for link sharing is that it’s more social – people do more interaction beyond links and that keeps them coming back. The absence of a built in ranking for links is actually helpful here in not encouraging rings of link spammers – as is a crowd that will unfollow you at the drop of a hat if they feel “marketed” to.
Unlike Digg where the primary activity is adding links and digging them, Twitter fosters conversation and that means that time there building relationships doesn’t feel wasted.
Thoughts? Comments? Let us know in our comments section or hit me up on Twitter (duh!) @nmallin.
