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Social bookmarking PR requires sustained community participation
February 12th, 2007 by Eric
Web 2.0 sites and marketing techniques influence everyone?? news experience, even those who don??t surf the net, that??s the topline finding of a Wall Street Journal investigative piece called the ??Wizards of Buzz.?
The WSJ carefully profiled Digg, Newsvine, Netscape, Del.icio.us, and other ??social bookmarking? sites where users sift through billions of web links and highlight the dozen most interesting for each other. Prominent placement can also yield a sharp and immediate payoff ?? one startup website??s traffic went from virtually nil to over 50,000 hits per day after appearing on the front page of Digg. Indirectly, by influencing journalists and bloggers, these sites shape the buzz around almost everything for everybody.
So how do nonprofits crack the Digg homepage, secure tens of thousands of visitors immediately and influence discussion about their cause far and wide? There are two laborious methods that work, and one quick and easy way that doesn??t.
The first way that works is to get a top Digger to push it there for you. That involves identifying Diggers who are interested in the topic and either pitching them (or even paying them) to do it.
The second way that works is to have someone on staff or a serious volunteer to cultivate the community credibility to put it there themselves. This approach would yield repeat payoffs, but it??s a serious investment of time: Top Diggers tell WSJ they are spending two or three hours daily on the site.
What doesn??t work is having a bunch of staff sign up at Digg right before they need something to get big. I once found out the hard way how easy it is to run afoul of Digg??s efforts to prevent this kind of manipulation of their community.
Last November, I gave a workshop to a group of environmental activists on various Web 2.0 organizing techniques. The workshop was a in a computer lab, so I helped everybody create an account with Digg and vote for one of the attendees?? websites, just for practice. Two days later, Digg suspended my account. They only grudgingly restored it after some serious groveling and begging on my part.
As with all other online communities, active members get deferential treatment and ??Johnny Come Latelys? who hope to get something out of the community before they contribute anything to it can expect only limited success.
