When Marketing Is Unwanted Options

[cre8pc]

Last I checked, a blog post I wrote has been dugg over 1000 times and is one of the popular ones in the Digg Design category.

That might be something to celebrate, except all I've done is brought unintended traffic to my blog (over 23,000 visitors in 12 hours), who followed the link to the resource I wrote about. I was happy to present that resource because it has been a goldmine of information.

However, Digg users blasted it to hell.

Not only did they attack the resource for its site design, my own blog comments went out of control with every possible ugly kind of link and trackback to porn and splogs you can imagine. I had to close comments in that blog post.
/
I've apologized to the University at Digg, where the children are writing their comments.

I've updated by blog post with why I had to close comments.

I've written I Don’t Digg Being Dugg

Can someone please explain to me how this activity is a positive, helpful marketing tool?

I didn't Digg my own post. Someone else did. I'm not sure how it caught fire, but at the moment, there are over 1000 diggs for it and several more per minute. My server has held up.

Which part of this experience am I supposed to be enjoying?

Why would anyone want me to write about THEIR resource, only to have it be attacked and dragged through the streets?

[JohnMu]

Careful, Kim - "I don't digg being dugg" could hit digg

You might want to implement something like this:
http://sonspring.com/journal/deflecting-digg

There are a few other people that do something similar... I think that those Digg-users who would like your site will be able to find it through many other ways or will know to enter the URL manually... You could however, redirect it to a page explaining your reasons for the redirect.

John

[ukdaz]

I'm not sure why people have done this... possibly out of envy that you found it first?

I wouldn't worry too much though, as a decent person its natural you might wonder why your post attracted a**holes like the ones you got posting onyour blog... at the end of the day, they're just a**holes and likely not much more, so maybe take pleasure out of that?

Instead just think of the help you gave us... without you its unlikely I'd have found this resource you so kindly pointed out. For that I (for one) am grateful.

Cheers!

Daz

[EGOL]

Careful, Kim - "I don't digg being dugg" could hit digg tongue.gif

lol... Right!

I think that softplus and ukdaz are right. Diggers can be a cynical group. A couple of things on my site have been dugg and the results have been great. Lots of immediate links (a few thousand) and within 48 hours my content was featured on some really good sites. Then my rankings shot up.

Most of those links were temporary but they gave a great initial boost and the good rankings that resulted have held as a few high quality links took hold.

I am looking forward to launching a few more digg bait items on my site soon.

[cre8pc]

John, I'm afraid to look to see if the anti-Digg post got Dugg

Eric and I are trying to find the silver lining in this...and haven't found it yet. My blog is getting the "Digg Effect", but nobody is staying there. They see the resource I wrote about, and go there.

That's fine for the University I wrote about and I'm happy for them. I just hate how Digg users attacked the University site. They never would have, had I not written about it.

Had someone not Dugg on my post.

In new anti-Digg post, I wrote:

Another way of looking at it is this. You take a walk through a park and quietly enjoy it and the experience. Perhaps you will recommend it to someone else. Or, you can visit the park and leave graffiti all over the benches, paths, and toss toilet paper into the tree branches.

This is what people are doing nowadays. The Internet continues to reflect the physical world. No one is held accountable.

So. Which part of this Digg activity am I supposed to be happy about, now that something I wrote has officially been slaughtered there?

I'm not the type of person who brings hell to someone's door. I'm sure the University can tolerate the Digg comment abuse, but why should they have to?

As soon as posted again in my blog, the comment spam went crazy again. I may have to turn off all comments on my blog because of the "Digg Effect".

The link you showed me is interesting. I've read it. It is kinda like throwing out the baby with the bathwater approach and even he changed his mind about doing it. So what recourse do we have?

Daz, thank you. I know that MY readers appreciated that resource. I wrote the post for them.

Is the purpose of Digg, for marketing, to be a traffic junkie? Doesn't targeted, qualified traffic matter anymore?

[JohnMu]

Ignore them, Kim - or block them if you don't want to have to ignore them. They are most likely just there for the ride, for the entertainment -- which is cheapest by being childish.

But look at the Digg-count and look at the number of comments (at least on Digg; I don't know what you deleted on your site): there are still more people who "digg" your amazing link than those who think your "page is ugly"... Let the latter think whatever they want. If some kid at random came up to you and told you that your car was ugly, would you even bother to think about it?

Maybe you need to add an IQ test to your comments (add two single-digit numbers)?

John

If you do not want to block digg-referrers altogether, perhaps it would make sense to pre-moderate your comments, at least for digg-referrers? I think I stumbled over a WP plugin that does that; or you could do it like that in general.

John

[joedolson]

Being dugg, I think, is tantamount to taking your website into a boys high school for critique - there are some bright, generous kids who will appreciate it. There are some teachers who'll really get into it and make lucid comments. There are a whole lot of jackasses who will go out of their way to criticize.

(I say boys high schools because the target audience for Digg is definitely predominantly male...)

Personally, I've never gone to any great effort to get Dugg. Fact of the matter is that I have as much work as I can keep up with already - just getting more _traffic_ seems pretty pointless. I'm not interested in what Digg has to offer - if something happens, and I get Dugg, that's fine - but I'll mostly ignore it.

(I do wonder, however, whether this will have a long term impact on my own traffic...I've got three or four links from that list...)

This post has been edited by joedolson: Jan 20 2007, 02:50 PM

[cre8pc]

If you do not want to block digg-referrers altogether, perhaps it would make sense to pre-moderate your comments, at least for digg-referrers? I think I stumbled over a WP plugin that does that; or you could do it like that in general.

Comments are already moderated at my blog. Nothing appears unless I approve it. However, I'm being bombarded with a high volume of nonsense due to Digg. They aren't commenting to my blog, itself. All the comments I'm finding are about the University resource I wrote about. It's their site being attacked by Diggers. That's why I'm unhappy, as obviously I would not have wished this for them.

I turned off comments so I don't have to moderate them either, for that particular post. The anti-Digg one hasn't hit the airwaves yet, so all is fairly calm so far.

Egol, your experience sounds more positive. As I said, I'm finding that the majority of linking is to the resource I wrote about, but there's still a number of more normal actions where the person will link to the resource and credit "Cre8pc" with the find and link to the blog. Those are nice

Still can't believe the server is holding up (it's at Bluehost). Kudos to them. I've never had this kind of traffic to my blog before.

Out of curiosity, where to you get the math thingys for comments, like what Bill has in his? I need a step like that in my comment process.

[Brad]

Frankly, I think Digg is mostly inhabited by plaid-on-plaid-polyester-leisure-suit-wearing internet marketers, *.spammers and other internet weeds. Do you really care what they think? All they want to do is destroy other people's things or comment spam (same thing).

More normal people interested in news are probably at Reddit anyway.

[bragadocchio]

The thing is though, Kim, Digg isn't a marketing tool

It's just a place for people to hang out and point out sites and stories and videos. A good number of those people are self-centered and immature .

Some of the people at Digg think that they are the center of the universe. As one commenter there wrote: "ignore it, it's just digg bait." As if your purpose in writing that post was solely to have it land on Digg.

Here's someone else who was less than pleased by a post on his site being dugg:

Digg Scares Me (403 Go Away!)

The last thing from my site that was dugg had enlightening comments such as:

A message to the submitter of this article......die

If digg closed down tomorrow, and the children who wrote comments like that had no place to express their dull witticisms, that would be fine with me.


As for comments on my blog, I moderate all of my comments. As good as Aksimet is, some real spam garbage comes through. I will publish a comment if it is critical, but if it's completely off topic or childish or a link drop, I don't think twice about it, and just delete it.

Out of curiosity, where to you get the math thingys for comments, like what Bill has in his? I need a step like that in my comment process.

I had to remove the one that I was using - it wasn't working correctly.

[cre8pc]

Do you really care what they think?

No. What's got me concerned is that they are attacking a resource I wrote about, and I had no way of stopping that from happening. Nor did it even occur me for a second that a little blog post I wrote would be dugg over a 1117 (just checked) times. It's taken on a life of its own, with an intent that doesn't even remotely come close to resembling my own.

Maybe people love this stuff?

If I wrote about one of you, to feature your blog, resource, site, something you did....and it was dugg by somebody, and the result was that your blog, resource, site, something you did thing was publically degraded, attacked, spit on and otherwise defamed, how would you feel?

This can happen on other Web 2.0 entities as well. I keep questioning the logic and ethics of it

I drive myself nuts.

[JohnMu]

That's the link I was looking for, thanks Bill.

Kim, if immature traffic came my way through a link on your site, I would be honored to be linked to from your site. You placed the link. You did not create the traffic, it just followed a link to you and a link to me. Don't worry yourself crazy about this -- you're just doing a good job and it happened to attract a bunch of weirdos (loud) as well as all the good people (quiet and happy).

John

This post has been edited by softplus: Jan 20 2007, 03:14 PM

[cre8pc]

The thing is though, Kim, Digg isn't a marketing tool

I guess there's a lot of confusion about that. One of the things I kept hearing at SES Chicago was that Digg was a marketing tool and I "needed" it to get more business.

I doubt any of this experience will bring more business

Your mathy thingy broke, Bill?

If anyone has alternatives, please share. Readers of this thread can all benefit if they need help.

Added> Eric and I went to Digg Scares Me Eric thinks I should do what that guy did, only make a "U-turn", and send the Digger back to Digg

[JohnMu]

I don't have Wordpress so all I can do is copy links, but Matt Cutts uses Math Comment Spam Protection ( http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/changed-my-captcha/ )

John

[cre8pc]

I just heard from someone who covers social media, and who is a Digg user. He wrote to "apologize for the actions of the immature 12-year old fanboys that ruin the experience for all us content producers."

I won't convey identity, but he wrote a nice note in which he understood my frustration with this experience and could relate to it, but still hopes I don't give up on Digg...or at least, keep promoting improvements for it.

That, I'm happy to do!

It was very cool to hear from a sane Digg user, I must say

(meanwhile, stats show my blog traffic since Midnight...28,000 visitors and 1239 diggs...)

[cre8pc]

Thought this might be interesting to note.

Chris Sherman on Social Search: New Marketing Opportunities

Tagging...click-through tracking...search history features. These are just some of the ways that search engines are now following human behavior on the web. It's the latest development in search marketing - and successful marketers have already figured out how to drive new traffic from it.

Find out why Social Search is the hottest thing on the web these days - and how you can reach new markets and opportunities using social search strategies.

[cre8pc]

Update:

A friend of mine has been analyzing my server logs, as this event came at a time when he was already researching social media events such as this.

The benefit to me, personally, as measured by conversions (inquires into services, for ex.), is zero.

There's still above ave. traffic into my blog, but of the nearly 4000 visitors, approx. 150 of them landed on the blog homepage or the stories I posted yesterday. The rest came from Digg and others like it, to the specific post I wrote about another website. 98% of that traffic immediately left my blog to checkout the resource I covered.

Of the number of actual Diggs (I stopped looking...its over 1500 I think), only a handful of that number were Digg commenters who trashed the resource, and later me for speaking out against their behavior, (about 40 comments.) They were largely abusive and ugly to read. Interestingly, those Diggers felt fully justified to trash the resource I wrote about in my blog, and yet called me colorful names for questioning them.

[SEOigloo]

I'm so sorry you're having this headache, Kim.

What is it about the total lack of personal, real-life accountability the Internet engenders that brings out the absolute worst in so many people? It's hard to believe that the spam our blog gets is a true representation of how the spammers would speak, face-to-face, to a stranger. It makes me wonder if people have demonic alter-egos that surface when the opportunity to be faceless is presented. The spam we get is just nuts and very obnoxious. I really appreciate you posting about this, as we have never felt confident about the benefits of a place like Digg.

Miriam

[A.N.Onym]

You know, this thread nearly killed any desire to get dugg. I am sure I can find a more respectable resource to get attention from.

Though getting thousands of links may be tempting, but I'd rather get noticed by more sensible folks. Then again, there will always be bullies in a fairly large crowd, right?

[sanity]

Thanks for sharing Kim. After hearing so many positive things about Digg it's good to hear an opposite viewpoint. Just a shame you had such a negative experience.

I am sure I can find a more respectable resource to get attention from.

Hear, hear.