Yesterday, the popular social content site, Digg, made some pretty drastic changes to its taxonomy. This change certainly softened the corners of the traditionally tech driven social site, providing a greater diversity of content options. There is a new Lifestyle category and greater prominence for Sports and Entertainment categories. Additionally, Offbeat, which has historically served as the catch all for stories that didn't fit elsewhere, has been broken out into its own category with a variety of subcats.

It will be interesting to see how the fork-tongued Digg hard corps react to this invitation to art and puppy lovers to join their ranks. My guess is that it could go one of two ways:

1) They leave and find the next best thing. This is a tech savvy crowd that knows it and prides themselves on being hip to the coolest new thing out there. It is possible that this process was already underway.

2) They go the way of Phish fans following the break up of the Greatful Dead in the mid 90's. Before I go on, while I enjoy the music of both bands, I am by no means a die-hard fan of either. which I think gave me a more neutral take on the situation. When the The Dead broke up and all these people flooded over to start going to Phish concerts, it seemed that Phish fans felt the needed to super-charge their fan-dom and fight the yuppie-posers (ie Me) who were encroaching on their thing. While hateful comments are already the norm, it's possible that veteran Diggers may lash out and bury posts in the new categories.

I guess a third option is that veterans actually like the new categories because the new outlets will stop people from posting stories in categories that aren't a good fit.

I any case, Digg's reasoning has to be in-part motivated by the need to grow their audience, most likely to make the site more appealing for advertisers or potential buyers. Only time will tell if their approach will achieve that goal or if it will drive away the people that made the site what it is.

Labels: digg, smo, social media optimization

We all dream of having our servers crash because one of our articles made the front page of Digg (AKA the Digg Effect). Or launching the latest Facebook app that yields widespread acclaim and countless new friends for your profile. Unfortunately, not all businesses are in a field that Digg users care about or that would benefit from Facebook's user base. The truth is that most businesses probably fall into this category. Not to fear though, there are other options that may not be as well known, but that can be effective.

Propeller.com, Netscape's social content sharing service, offers a platform that is similar to Digg. Users can submit, vote and comment on articles. Propeller offers a wide range of categories and the users tend to be a bit more constructive than are the often harsh critics that populate the ranks of Digg. Most importantly, Propeller gets a significant amount of traffic and good content can reach the front page with less then 50-60 votes, as opposed to the hundreds and even thousands of votes required to reach the front page of Digg.

StumbleUpon also allows users to submit and comment on web content. Users can give the "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" for content that they come across using browser toolbar buttons. By voting for content, Stumble gets a sense of the type of content you like and dislike and will serve up popular pages that fit your profile. In addition, Stumble will suggest other users that appreciate similar content. Again, reaching the front page of StumbleUpon will not likely take down your webserver, but it will bring qualified customers to your site.

The two keys for an effective social media strategy are to provide good, unique content and to distribute it to people that will be interested by targeting the correct channels. These are just two, semi-mainstream options to consider. As new social media site continue to emerge, businesses must focus their efforts on their proven options while continuously testing new sites becasue you never know when you might just uncover the next Digg.

Labels: digg, facebook, propeller, smo, social media optimization, stumbleupon