Digg has been on a banning rampage lately. The most famous digger to get banned has been Zaibatsu. The first glimpse of what Digg was up to came when Brian Cuban was banned. By the count in our database this morning, there have been about 600 users banned in the last week or so. That figure could be a little off -- we may not have researched someone for a few months -- but it shows the magnitude of what Digg is up to.

They also rolled up ltdraper, donatpms, and olivertaco. According to the email we received from Digg, donatpms was banned not because that user did anything (we haven't run anything through that), but because it was associated with someone who had been banned. So if you've been banned, they don't ever want you back. Good luck with that policy Digg, DHCP is enough to keep users coming back as much as they desire. There are a lot of agencies out there running dozens if not hundreds of users through multiple proxies.

Perhaps that's why Zaibatsu says he'll be back.

Don't Put All Your Eggs in One Basket

One of the benefits of using a structured approach to social media marketing is that you're not building an account, you're building a set of relationships. When you're Stalking Big Game on Digg, the key is to find a diverse group of people that are likely to play the game. That doesn't mean "gaming the system," it means finding other like minded individuals that understand that there is an unstated quid pro quo in digging. I'll digg your submissions if they're good, and in return you'll digg mine. That's not to say that I'll digg any bit of spam that you want to post, but I will give you priority in what I look at when I'm digging. The scripting and the bots are really just about time savings, not explicitly gaming the systems. As we've always said, you shouldn't do anything with a script that you wouldn't do in person. It's just a macro for saving you time.

Likewise, you shouldn't be invested solely in a single network, even one as powerful as Digg. There are 1,000s of Social Networks to choose from when you're promoting your content. Pick a manageable number of those and spread your bets. Likewise, as a marketer I'd rather my company have several accounts on Digg in the 500 range rather than be a single Top 100 Digger.

Stop Using Scripts

The flip side of a crisis is opportunity, and this new rampage by Digg is an unbridled opportunity for social marketers. By shaking things up, they'll be removing the log jam at the top. If users start to rebel against the blind diggers as we suspect, "well behaved" social marketers will have a distinct advantage. The 80 users from the Top 1000 that have been banned for script usage just opened up a lot of slots for people to move up.

The next release of the PMS Social Suite is going to see some real changes in direction. For now, we're heavily suggesting to our users that they concentrate on the analytical features of the product and refrain from using the scripts. Digg has been rolling up script users by looking in their logs for Diggs coming from pages on their sites that do not have a Digg button. The Digg Friends Easy script started all of this, and our shoutback function used an improvement on that script. So for now, don't use that.

If you want to support your friends like MrBabyMan does, then go to the Manage Friends page, click the "Submissions" radio button, then click the "Go to Friend Page" button. Click each of the stories you want to Digg (you can set TabMixPlus to automatically open links in a new tab), then cycle through the tabs. This is pretty much what MrBabyMan does, and Digg isn't banning him, even though he has an 89.2% Blind Digging rate.

We'd appreciate some user input on whether we should try to come up with scripts that don't have the vulnerability that Digg spotted in Digg Friends Easy? But before you form an opinion, read the next section.

New Features Coming

Digg's crackdown on scripts is going to make things a lot better for PMS Social Suite Users. Given that it will take more time to support your friends, choosing which friends you support is going to be even more important. And instead of using free Greasemonkey scripts on Digg, you'll be much better off if you can do your analysis completely offline from Digg. The entire key will be to find users that will Digg your submissions -- you just can't afford to waste time with people that don't understand the game. If you've got the right tools, you'll have a distinct advantage over the people that have had the rug pulled out from under them.

Top Diggers will tell you that the key is to find the best content before anyone else does. To help our users with that task, the upcoming version of the PMS Social Suite will use a list of 200 sites that we've developed by analyzing what makes it to the front page of Digg. We have a database application that will be hitting that list continuously. When you visit our new dashboard, you'll be shown a list of "Hot Stories" that have not yet been submitted to Digg and are from a source that has Diggable content. Click the link and you'll get two tabs opened: one tab will have the actual article, and the other will have the Digg submission page with the URL filled out. You probably won't be able to beat MakiMaki to a post on Huffington Post, but your chances are excellent for being first to getting great content for your submissions.

Another key to building relationships on Digg is commenting. One of the best places to comment is on a story that has very few comments but is likely to go front page. Our dashboard will also have a section called "Hot Submissions to Comment." This is a list of submissions from the Top 100 Diggers with 3 or less comments. It also shows the current number of Diggs so you've got an idea as to whether or not it's going to hit. Chime in first with something witty and you'll get great visibility.

The Dashboard also shows the list of users that you're tracking and key statistics that are updated continuously. For instance, you can see a count of how many friends you have in the Top 100 and Top 1000. We've also calculated the number of friends you have that are "Solid" and "Weak" according to our algorithm.

We've also eliminated the need for you to run your own research jobs. We've set up a network of machines that cycle through our database and perform the research function for you. We currently have stats on over 26,000 Diggers for you to mine. We're doing much more in-depth research now, including finding Diggers with high rates of mutual friend support. We've got a list of hundreds of people that are very likely to become mutual and support your submissions. For each month of subscription you pay for, we'll provide you with a list of 10 high value friends. Sign up for a year and you'll start off with 120 very strong friends to seed your network.

But the biggest key to success is to establish an offsite friend network. The Top Diggers don't shout to each other, they send email and IMs back and forth asking for votes. The best friend that you can find is someone that has a very high rate of mutual voting, but also has a way to contact them offsite. Part of our new research service is that we look for links to known services such as AIM, email addresses, StumbleUpon, etc for a user. You can mark a user as an "offsite friend" and contact them through other means. You can store an email address for them in the database. Push a button and you can send an email to a list of users with the url of a story you'd like supported. It's just like what the Top Diggers do, but more efficiently.

And if you'd like to be considered as a friend to other PMS Social Suite users, you can mark your user as open in your profile. You'll see a list of stories other users are promoting, and you can mark your own stories to be promoted. Obviously, with the analytics you'll have a good idea of who is digging you, so be a good friend and you'll get back results.

How Soon?

Soon, very soon. A lot of this was already in the works before Digg started their rampage. I'd say we're 95% done right now. Stay tuned.

We've heard a comment from a number of "A-Listers" that all of your social media activity should be "organic." That you shouldn't use automation or do anything that isn't natural with sites like Digg, because somehow that's cheating.

Our question back is "What's so noble about carpal tunnel syndrome?" If you're using automation to do the same things you would do if you sat at the computer and clicked your mouse in a mind numbing session, what's the big deal? Is it the user's fault that most of these social networks have built such a brain dead and poor user interface that accomplishing even simple tasks requires minutes of clicking? Is it the user's fault that these sites take forever to load a page? Is it the user's fault that most of these sites have limited their APIs to the point of near uselessness?

What's the difference between using a script to accomplish simple tasks and hiring an intern or someone from India to do the same thing? Is an agency that pays a staff of people to mindlessly click on social sites all day somehow more magnanimous than the sole proprietor that uses a macro to accomplish the same thing? Do you really think that these big name consultants that charge several hundred dollars for a consultation are spending hours a day of their own time clicking their mice on social networks?

How about the use of a programmable keyboard or mouse? What's the difference between using a FireFox plugin like Greasemonkey that will click a few links for you and open a window and using a programmable keyboard that will do the same thing when you hit a function key?

How about using a browser plugin that automatically opens all links on a page in a new tab so that you can easily read the stories? That's a script, isn't it?

How about using a super high-speed internet connection? Doesn't that give you an unfair advantage over someone using dial up? Doesn't that put more of a load on the website? To be fair, shouldn't you be using a 56K dial up line to do your social networking?

If social networks would make simple tasks like unfriending 100 friends that are completely unproductive a one step operation, there wouldn't be a need to use scripts. Instead, they're trying to maximize page views. So frankly, using scripts helps them with that goal. If it weren't for automated scripts, a lot of their traffic and revenue would go away.

Do as They Say, Not As They Do

Don't think for a minute that the majority of the people pontificating about "organic" use of these sites aren't using automation themselves. We're not going to call anyone out by name, but by using our tool to analyze the friendship networks and voting habits of Top Diggers, it's quite clear that they're very automated and voting in blocks like crazy. Search your feelings, you know it to be true.

If you buy into the party line that only "organic" use of these sites is acceptable, you're just guaranteeing that you won't be able to compete with the "A-Listers" -- which, frankly, is exactly they way they'd like it. They're not in business to create competition. So if you'd always like to be in second place, listen to their advice.

I'll also point out that the same people that rail against using scripts to make social networking more efficient usually have installed ad blocker software. So who is really stealing bandwidth?

Won't I Get Banned?

True, if you do something crazy and Digg a few thousand stories in a few hours you're going to get caught. Especially if you're testing a script in development and it gets away from you! Not that I know anyone that has happened to or anything. But if your script has the appropriate pauses, you only vote a percentage of stories, and you do the same things a human would do then there's a very low probability of getting caught.

And frankly, you shouldn't be putting all your eggs into a single basket. Keep an offline record of your relationships. If you get banned, it's just a matter of a new IP address and adding back the relationships you've already built. Your tools can do that for you, can't they?

Keep in mind that the top users get forgiven when they get caught using a script. I've heard several instances of top diggers that got banned and reinstated the next day after promising to behave. They're still misbehaving; they're just doing a better job of not getting caught. But if you're not one of the top people, good luck even getting your emails answered.

It's How You Use Your Tools That Count

The same car that can be used by a drunk driver at 2:00AM can also be used to drive the kids to school at 8:00AM. The car isn't good or evil -- it's how it's used that matters. If you're using tools to spread spam the community is going to punish you anyway, so it's not going to work out. But if you use a tool to be more efficient and do the same things that you'd do anyway if you were willing to risk carpal tunnel syndrome and spend 10 hours a day clicking then there shouldn't be any problem.

The real question is "How much is your time worth?" If it's not worth $19.95/month to save a few hours a day of your time, then keep clicking. Otherwise, you really ought to look into automating some of your drudgery.

I've been thinking about this for a long time, and I just can't see how Twitter is going to make enough money to justify their venture capital investment (which is reported but not publicly verified to be around $20M) or $80M valuation. Five years from now we're going to look back at the Twitter phenomenon the same way we scratch our heads today when we try to explain Pets.com. If you can't look at the $80M valuation of Twitter and figure out that the Web 2.0 bubble is going to pop, then there's just no helping you.

A lot of people have been musing about how Twitter can make money. As users that's important, because we don't want to see the service disappear. But frankly, if you have to think long and hard about how a business idea is going to make money, it's probably not going to work. I'm really wondering what the elevator pitch was for Twitter, because after reading a dozen blog posts on this subject I still haven't seen a complete idea. Maybe I'm wrong and they've got something absolutely brilliant up their sleeve, but more likely the pitch went along the lines of "We'll have millions of users, that's got to be worth something!"

It Takes a Lot of Money to Be a Successful VC Investment

You have to keep this in the context of a VC investment. VC's don't invest to get a 7% return on their money. They're not in that game. They invest in high risk levels, and fully expect only 1 out of 20 companies to pop big time if they're doing a good job. Which means to break even, they define success as 20x return on investment. That doesn't mean they'll get it, but in order to justify the investment they have to be able to see a way that they'll get a 20x return. That means that Twitter has to sell for at least $400M in the exit. In that case, the founders probably get a pittance because the VCs are going to get the first grab at the money until they've met their goals. It doesn't matter that you've only sold them 20% of the company, you won't get your money until they get theirs.

What kind of revenue does a company with a valuation of $400M have to generate? It depends upon the multiplier, but in this environment a valuation of 10x revenue would be pretty strong. Or maybe 100x earnings. So Twitter has to be a $40M revenue company just to break even in the eyes of the investors. The general rule of thumb for silicon valley VC investments is that you want the company to get to $100M in five years to be a success. If you want to see an explanation of how VC investments work, go back to our oldie but goody post on Venture Capital Term Sheets.

Riding the Wave

There's no way they can hit those kinds of numbers. Not a chance. Let's keep in mind some of the major factors in their successful adoption so far:

• It's Cool - Twitter was riding a wave of coolness at the height of the Web 2.0 madness. Anybody who was anybody was Twittering. To quote Eldon Tyrell, "The light that burns twice as bright, burns half as long. And you have burned so very very brightly, Roy."
• It's Free - The barrier to adoption was miniscule. Just go to their page and sign up. They don't even collect much demographic data; you just need a nickname and an email address. Unfortunately, as Twitter is finding out, there's a huge difference between free and a nickel.
• Third Party Tools - They were smart and built an ecosystem for third party tools. They provided a fairly open API, which allowed a wide array of blogging plugins, readers, bots, etc to be built. There's only one problem with that: They killed their advertising potential. You can't serve banner ads to someone that doesn't visit your pages. Judging from the people I'm following, more than 75% of the Twitter power users are using something other than the web interface to tweet.

Basic Assumptions about Twitter's Business Model

Let's take a look at the basic business model limitations for Twitter. To do this, we need an idea of the number of transactions, users, customers, etc that they can support. Since none of this is publicly available, we'll have to make some guesses.

• How Many Twitter Users are There? - I've seen estimates of 3.8M users, but frankly there's no way the number of active users is that high. The 3.8M number may be the total number of people that have actually signed up for an account, but there just aren't that many active users of Twitter. Take a look at Twitterholic. The number one Twitter user in terms of followers is BarakObama, with 60,601 followers this morning. What percentage of active Twitter users are following Obama? 10%? I'll bet it's a lot higher than that because it's something cool to do. But if it's 10%, then there are 600K active Twitter users. If you look at the entire top 100 users and assume there is no overlap in followers between any of the 100 (in other words, just add up all the followers in the top 100), you get an upper limit of 1.3M users. Now that 600K is starting to look a bit high, isn't it? But I'm going to be generous and assume that there really are 600K active Twitter users, although it's completely apparent that there aren't. The actual number, which only Twitter knows, is probably a lot closer to 100K active users.
• How Many Pages Views a Day do they Get? - This is pretty hard to even guess. A SWAG on it would be that the average number of refreshes for their 600K users is 5/day? So 3M pages views a day? Evan Weaver did some playing around with Compete and came up with 71M views/month, which is a mere 2.3M pages views/day. Twitter's Alexa rank is hovering around 1,000, so 3M page views seems extremely optimistic.
• What Rates Can Twitter Charge for Advertising? - Pubmatic says the CPM for large sites is down to $0.67. I doubt very much that Twitter can command high CPM rates because people aren't on their site to look for advertising, they're focused on something else. The average CPM of large sites is $0.92 for the last three months, so let's be generous and say Twitter can get a CPM of $1.00 because they're so cool.
• How Many Tweets Could an Advertiser Send? - I'd be really surprised if users would put up with more than 1 tweet a day from a sponsor, and even more surprised if they'd take up to 3. But let's assume that Twitter can deliver 3 tweets/day as a sponsored advertisement.
• How Much Would Someone Pay to be a Twitter User? - This is tough because different users get different value from Twitter. For most users, anything over free would cause them to stop using the service. But as Andy Beal pointed out, he's got 3,000 followers so he'd be willing to pay $5/month. LinkedIn gets $19.95/month for their premium service, but there's a lot more utility and payback. When you're on a job search, $19.95 doesn't seem like much. Let's be generous again and say that Twitter could charge $20/month and get the top 10,000 power users to pay. That's pretty aggressive. It's more than Andy said he would pay, and he's a real Twitter nut.
• How Many API Users Do They Have? - It's a lot. The rumor is they have peaks of 12K/sec on their API services. My guess, based purely on sampling from my own feed, is that about 50% of the users out their are getting their Twitter fix without hitting Twitter's web page. That sorta fits with the 2.3M page views/day estimate and their 600K active users. That would be 300K users doing 7.6/page views/day, and the other 300K leaving their readers open and hitting the API every minute or so.

What Options Do They Have?

Andy Beal over at Marketing Pilgrim brought my attention to this in his article "Twitter Needs Your Help to Make Money". He summarized Ben Kunz's viewpoint article at Business Week that suggested 4 routes Twitter could take to monetize:

• Twitter Could ask Users to Pay - Alas, this one just won't generate enough revenue. If they can charge $20/month ($240 year! Wait until the wife sees that credit card charge!) and 10,000 of their power users that would see the value sign up, it's just $200K/month in revenue, or $2.4M/year. In other words, an underpaid CEO's salary would be 10% of their revenue. And the value to someone like Andy goes way down when his 3,300 followers start to bail from the service because it's not worth that much money to them. $5/month is much more reasonable, and that's only a $600K/year company. The bulldog will be mighty hungry.
• Twitter Could Get Paid for Messages - The idea here is to insert tweets into the twitter stream. Kevin Makice had a great comment on Andy's blog that suggested that Twitter could "make it a requirement to follow 2-3 (minimum) official sponsors in the same way and context you would any other friend or organization." Again, the problem here is numbers. 600K users getting 3 tweets/day at $1 CPM is $648K/year. But what is a 140 character, easily filtered message worth? Realistically, it's $0.50 CPM for $324K/year. That won't even cover the sushi bill. Worse yet, to get to just $10M in revenue at a CPM of $1 they'd have to send their 600K users 46 commercial tweets/day. Think about that. I doubt there would be many users left.
• Twitter Could Extract Money from User Data - Which would cause a backlash among users who seem to forget that the intimate thoughts they're tweeting every day are available for all to see. Besides that, the cat is already out of the bag. Google crawls Twitter heavily. Just do a site:twitter.com google search. I just can't see more than a few million in value here, and the risk of completely alienating the customer base. But let's give them $2M because they need it. This one is important to remember because it's bait for someone like Google to buy them.
• Twitter Could Sell Ads - Again, the numbers are even worse. They're getting at best 3M page views/day, so at a CPM of $1 they can get $1.09M/year in revenue. Ben Kunz came at the number in a very different fashion and came out with an upper value of $12.26/user/year. Using his numbers and the estimate of 600K active users you get $7.3M in revenue at a max. But his numbers require a CPM of $7, which I just don't see advertisers being willing to pay in this climate. And people getting their tweets through a Reader don't see the ads, so divide everything by 2.

What My Tweet Peeps Had to Say

I also asked this question of my Twitter Followers and additional ideas were:

• Charge for API Access - Twitter would charge API providers to have access to the API, perhaps on a sliding scale with a certain amount of activity for free. The basic problem with this is that whenever your business plan includes the concept of building a platform for someone else you're likely to fail. Missionary work takes a very long time -- much longer than Twitter has if you make a few guesses about their burn rate. But the bigger problem is that it's now a revenue split. Using our assumption of 300K API users, could the API vendors really extract more than $10/user/month in fees? Most API users would just stop if it required cash to use the tool. Trust me, it's hard to get people to shell out cash, even when you've got an awesome tool. And yet still, Twitter can only take a percentage of the revenue that the API using applications generate or they kill the ecosystem. A license fee of more than 10% is probably not sustainable. So 10% of 300K users at $10/month = $3.6M/year. And that's if all of their API users switch over instead of dropping out. If they only convert half, it's $1.8M/year. No way.
• Make Money From SMS - Communications companies make money when you receive text messages. A lot of money, because they get to use unused bandwidth to deliver your messages. It's not like voice where it has to have a guaranteed delivery time. So there's probably a model in there where they can get some money as a kickback for generating all that traffic. So you'd think Twitter could pull off a deal where they get paid to send SMS traffic. Unfortunately, the money goes the other direction, which is why Twitter had to abandon SMS Services in many countries. "Twitter estimates its costs to be as high as $1,000 per user outside the US, Canada and India." $1,000 for a user worth $12.26? But even if they could work out a deal with a carrier in the US, the revenue potential is less than that of banner advertising. Nobody is going to sign up for a paid SMS model to get Tweets about what someone is having for dinner at 10 cents a pop.

Andrew's Thoughts

Andrew Finkle posted a response to the Business Week article titled "Monetizing Twitter." He covered a lot of the same ground we already have, but here are a few of his unique ideas:

• The Roboform Model - He rightfully points out that RoboForm was very successful with the freeware model. The problem for Twitter is that there is a wide variance in the value proposition among users. While everyone gets the same utility out of the freeware model, only a small percentage of Twitter users get enough return on investment to justify any kind of cost. And the fewer users that convert, the less the value proposition becomes to the users willing to convert. Would Andy still pay even $5/month for Twitter if he only had 100 followers?
• Contextual Ads - This is a really interesting idea.

  Someone will "Tweet" about a great book they just read, and that Tweet will be tied to an Amazon affiliate link where others can purchase the book. Or perhaps the Tweet will be location aware - "Craving Pizza in NYC", and as GPS allows Twitter will attach ads from local pizza parlors in NYC.

  But again, the numbers don't add up for enough money to make it worth Twitter's while. First, only a small percentage of Tweets have any content that could be monetized. I did a somewhat random sample and came up with about 2% of the tweets in my feed that one could attack an ad to. But you'd have to analyze every single tweet to determine if you can overlay an advertisement, so we're dramatically increasing the processing power requirements on a system that's already struggling. And what will be click through rates be? I commented on Andy's blog that they might be lucky to get a 2% CTR on 3.8M users for 10/day. That works out to $3.4M in revenue for the context ads. And that's back when I was willing to give them 3.8M active users. Use the more likely number of 600K and it's $536K/year. I'll bet that there computing cloud charges at Amazon would go up more than that for this scheme.

The Real Problem for Twitter

The real problem is that "All of the Above" is not an option for them. They could do a combination of things, but some of these are competitive. For instance, nobody is going to pay $20/month for a service that bombards them with ads. Nobody is going to pay a user fee and also pay an API fee. What they probably can do is charge for API access, thus driving people to the organic site, and then place advertisements. So what's their revenue potential? Usually the best way to approach these things is to look at the high and low ranges of the very pieces of your business model and then do a best and worst case analysis.

The best case scenario for Twitter doesn't cut it. They took $20M in venture capital. If things go perfectly they're still at less than half the $40M in revenue they need for the VCs to think they broke even. Remember, the standard benchmark for a company that does well but isn't a home run is $100M in revenue after five years.

Here Comes the Fire Sale

So why should you care about whether the VCs are happy? Because to paraphrase, if the investors aren't happy, ain't nobody gonna be happy. They've got to get their cash out. They don't make these investments because they're nice guys. When the VCs start to realize they've made an investment that's not going to work out, they start doing these things:

• Bring in Outside Advisors - Who will wager that the analysis they did on the foreign SMS costs was driven by a VC board member who was aghast at their burn rate? Their last round was for $15M, which usually is supposed to cover the burn for 2 years. 4 months later they were looking to cut costs, which means that the VCs started getting worried about the burn. They realize they've got to make that $15M last for quite some time given the current investment climate. I wonder if that last round of $15M came in traunches?
• Bring in Adult Supervision - You can always spot a VC funded startup in trouble. The founder/CEO gets a new business card that says "Architect" or "Visionary" and a CEO with gray hair is brought in to fix things. Why VCs don't just require that startups have adults in charge is beyond me.
• Cut Costs While Looking for a Suitor - If the company can't make the big hit it needs to, the VCs will administer a "haircut" and get costs in line so that the company can be bought. The problem for the founders is that their exit is pretty much gone at that point. The problem for the customers is that the original vision is not going to happen.
• Sell It Off - It's always funny to note that the amount an underperforming venture funded company is sold for is closely related to the buyout value for the preferred investors. The company doesn't have to be failing -- it just has to not be in range of a major home run any more. It costs VCs money to give their attention to companies, so it's better for them to sell it off and make it someone else's problem rather than continue the care and feeding, even if the company was making a small profit.

So to all the well wishers who say "Twitter is going to be able to make revenue somehow": I hate to rain on your parade, but some revenue isn't enough. They are a heavily venture funded company. Less than a home run means the sharks will be circling. If they turn into a $20M a year in revenue company they're a failure. They'll be sold off in a fire sale.

And their problems go much deeper than that. Evangelical work is always extremely difficult in any market. They've already accomplished something hugely impossible -- they started with nothing and created a ubiquitous service. That's a home run. But now they need lightning to strike in the same place 4 times, because they have to build a new business model, switch everyone over from free, and somehow grow their user base, without a competitor knocking them out. And everything they do to monetize will make their user base numbers trend downwards. Their only way out is a fire sale.

Why won't Google or someone just buy them as a "hood ornament" as Kunz suggests? They may very well do so, but the price will be a fraction of what Twitter needs. What if Google decided to provide a competing Twitter product? It could integrate with Gmail, Reader, their social networking, even search. It's a slam dunk for them. And it would probably be less expensive for them to develop it themselves to work within their existing architecture than to even pay a fire sale price for Twitter. The perfect time for Google to launch this service would be the day that Twitter announces their new monetization scheme. Google could offer to migrate all of your data from Twitter into their system. They're already crawling Twitter heavily anyway. Does anyone think they couldn't do it? And why would users take a chance on Twitter if the venerable and reliable Google offered a competing service for free? The same goes for Microsoft and Yahoo. And given the way the market is right now, are any of the big guys going to make a hood ornament acquisition unless it's a steal?

So enjoy Twitter while you can, but don't get too attached to and certainly don't make your business reliant upon it. It's fun, but so was Igrocer, pets.com, and a thousand other sites that we couldn't figure out how they were going to make money.

I'll say it again. If you have to think long and hard about how a business idea is going to make money, it's probably not going to work.

Yes, it's another cool Greasemonkey script from Promote My Site to improve your social media experience. This time it's for Twitter.

If you're new to Twitter, the first thing you find out is that you start off without anyone following you. So posting is like talking to yourself in the forest. Sure, your voice sounds great, but what's the point?

There are two basic strategies for getting people to follow you on Twitter. The first is to be famous. If you are Matt Cutts, Rand Fishkin, Jeremy Schoemaker, or Darren Rowse, all you have to do is hop down to the local pub, scrawl your twitter address on a napkin, and leave it on the bar. In a few days you'll have thousands of followers.

For the rest of us, it's a bit more work. Sure, you can mention the fact that you're now on Twitter on your blog and in various social media circles, but if you really want people to follow you, you need to start off by following other people. The easiest way to get into a conversation with a lot of people that share your interests is to find other people that share your interests, and then start following them and their followers. Eventually some of them will follow you back and you're off and Twittering!

This of course involves a lot of drudgery and mouse clicking, so in typical Promote My Site fashion we've built a Greasemonkey Script to Add and Manage Your Twitter Friends. That link points to the Fireboard Forum thread that will always have the latest news and versions. And of course, we've done a YouTube video on how to use it.

After you've followed a bunch of people, just sit back and watch the follow backs roll in. We've found that about 12% of the people with an interest in SEM have an automatic follow back set up. More will follow you as the day goes on. Give it a few days, then go to your followers page and drop the ones that aren't mutual. If they're not in to you, then it's time to just move on.

I started the week with around 50 followers. After a few days of testing this script and really not working very hard at it I'm coming up on 500 followers. Sure, I'm no rock star, but having a conversation with 500 people that share my interests is, well, interesting!

We're thinking of all kinds of things we could put into the premium version of the PMS Social Suite to expand this concept. If you attach a database to this you could do some brilliant things. If you've got any ideas, please drop us a note.

A lot of "experts" in social media have made the assertion that if you participate in a voting ring on any of the major social sites, you'll get caught. There is a mystique around the all-knowing data centers that can track your activities on their site. If you cheat, you'll get burned. It's that simple.

I'm not going to pass judgement on whether or not you should participate in voting rings. It's probably not good for your karma. But I am going to say that there is a lot of voting ring activity out there, and if you don't understand the issues around it you're going to be at a disadvantage.

The Rings Exist

It doesn't take much in the way of google searching to turn up a number of vote exchange networks. They're pretty blatant about it. Here are some of the major ones that I found with a cursory search:

• Piqqus - Formerly known as DiggBoss, Members exchange social votes on Digg, StumbleUpon and Propeller.
• SubmitterBot - Exchange Digg and StumbleUpon votes, part of a larger service
• 1rst Link - Exchange links on a huge list of social neworks, as well as a no-reciprocal link exchange.
• Spike The Vote - Formerly a Digg exchange site, was sold on Ebay and purchased by a Digger for $1,000 who shut it down.
• Stumblebot - Appears to be software that will generate stumbles. Not sure if this is a network or just a bot.
• Social Traffic Exchange - A forum for exchanging votes on several social media sites

There are lots more, but you get the idea. You'll notice I nofollowed those links because I don't want to encourage them. But the exchanges aren't limited to just forums and applications. Do a search for "social media" in Google and Yahoo Groups and you'll find several mailing lists all targeted at the same kind of activity.

This is Cheating!

Perhaps, but there is a ton of it going on. Is participating in one of these rings any different than the "A Listers" who send out 25 IMs in the morning to get the 15 votes on Sphinn required to get their articles to the Up and Coming section? Why is it always the same people getting to the front page on these sites? If you don't think there's some offsite networking going on in the social media world, you need to pull your head out of the sand.

Is it cheating when the system has become so corrupt that the way the "Big Names" get their stuff to the top is to rely upon soliciting votes from their friends? It's a self perpetuating cycle, because the people with offsite friend networks are the ones that get to the front page, and front page exposure on these networks is what leads even more people to follow you.

If you think it's possible for "great content" to simply rise to the top, then try this experiment. Go find the greatest Digg bait in the world, something that just can't miss. Submit it with an account that has no history and no friends. The only thing that's going to happen is that some other, more popular Digger is going to find your content and submit it again (ignoring your duplicate), and then it will get popular. This is a popular complaint about MrBabyMan -- people claim that he finds the gems with only a few votes and resubmits them in a different category.

The simple fact is that even the greatest content in the world requires promotion in order to get seen.

Analyze the Top Diggers

Here's an example of the activities of a top 100 Digger. You'd recognize the name, but I'm not going to out them. If you look at their history, they've been digging about 85 stories a day for the last two years. 39% of their submissions go popular.

How much work is 85 Diggs a day? If you put in 6 hours a day on the site, that's a Digg every 4.3 minutes. No breaks. No vacations. If you're taking the time to read the stories you're digging everything you read. This person also submits about 5 stories a day. And they blog a lot. And they participate in a lot of other social networks and are at the top of those too. And they've got a full time job. They either work 20 hours a day, or they've got some special help.

I suppose it's possible that they're just super-human and can Digg like that, but it's much more likely that they've got a bot or a Greasemonkey script that handles a lot of the load. Or there's an entire agency behind that persona doing all that work. Just vote the first five pages each day or the submissions of other popular Diggers, with a 4 minute delay. When you submit something, send an email blast to 25 buddies to get those first votes. Enough people follow this person that they can get most anything to the front page. They also do a good job of submitting Diggable material, but one wonders how the heck they're making money at it. Negative stories about McCain and Bush will always do well with the right care and feeding, but it's tough to monetize them.

Why Can't Social Sites Catch These People

It's mathematics, pure and simple. The problem is simply not computable in any reasonable amount of time.

Let's take our Top Digger in the above example and see if we could catch them by looking at the voting behaviors on their stories. The trick is that they send out 25 vote requests, but the pool of people they can request from is much larger, say 250. So for any given story, there's a 10% chance that a person out of the group will vote for it. And the average story gets a few hundred votes because they've become popular, so we're looking for 10% out of that.

This is a well understood problem in computer science. What we're trying to figure out here are the functional determinants in the data. We're saying that a submission by A leads to votes by B and C. If the variance is 0% -- in other words, every time A submits B and C vote, then it's pretty easy to spot. You can take a small sample of data, and just iterate through A,B,and C's behavior a single time and you'll find that there is an exact correlation. We can see that A functionally determines B and C.

But what if B & C only vote for A's stories 50% of the time? Now our nice and neat functional dependency algorithms won't work. We can't use a small random sample of data, we have to look at a much larger set in order to spot the trend. So instead of looking at 25 submissions to spot the trend, I'd have to look at all 2,500. And remember, out of the 1,000s of people that ever voted on a story submitted by A, I don't know who B & C are ahead of time. So I have to look at everyone that has ever voted on a submission by A. Now work the numbers if our voting pool only votes 10% of the time. If I look at our Top Digger's friends page I see that there are over 22,000 recent Diggs by people in their friend network. And that's a very small amount of Diggs compared to the total number of Diggs across all of their submissions. It's just not possible to spot the rings. If you had a billion dollars in venture capital and a giant supercomputer you still couldn't police it.

What Can Social Networks Do?

What is possible is to spot a ring if you have a hypothesis about who to look at ahead of time. For instance, let's say A is silly and submits something that is clearly spam. It gets 5 votes before it is marked as spam. Now checking the voting behavior of A vs 5 people is quite easy. And if you roll them up, what does it mean?

• You've taken out 5 people from a group of 250, which is pretty easy to rebuild.

• If you ban the Top Digger, you're opening yourself to the ultimate black hat attack. Want to take someone down? Just set up 5 fake accounts and have them digg the Top Diggers submissions 100% of the time. Then send a complaint to Digg that you've spotted a voting ring.
• Your process required manual intervention, which is quite expensive.

You can also send out employees to join these networks and participate, looking for people that are asking for their submissions to be voted up and banning them. They don't generally do this because someone can just ask for votes for someone else's submissions and have them wrongly accused of participating in the ring. If the sites are smart, they'll periodically insert stories from top users to be voted up. A black hatter could lay waste to hundreds of competitors by submitting their stories to various voting rings.

Likewise, they can track activity. If you vote a story every 2 seconds you're leaving a clear footprint. Except that people do that all the time without consequences on Digg. Witness the Greasemonkey scripts used by the bury brigade that automatically bury stories than contain certain keywords or from certain users. So if you're a top digger they're likely to check your history and if you do something like digg a bunch of stories without a pause you'll get caught.

There's no way they can catch everyone. They can't even catch a small percentage. What they can do is concentrate on policing their top users and clear spammers very carefully, and if they catch someone make their ban very public pour encourager les autres. And they can keep fostering the fantasy that anybody that cheats on a social network is going to get caught, aided and abbetted by "A List" people that did exactly that on their way up.

But if users stay away from submitting stories that are clearly spam, insert pauses in their voting, and limit their ring activity to around 10%, there's no way they're going to get caught. At least not until we get a few orders of magnitude in compute power available.

We received a frantic phone call from a client on Wednesday. We had done a site review as a favor a while back and they've been friends of the company for a very long time. The conversation went something like this:

Client: Our web store has been hacked! McAfee Site Advisor says we have malware, spyware, and viruses on our site!

Me: Really? That doesn't seem possible since you've got a Yahoo Store. And you've got the HackerSafe service checking your server every day. It hasn't complained, has it?

Client: No, but our sales have dropped to nothing today. And the warning from McAfee wasn't on our site yesterday.

Have You Been Hacked?

My first thought was "Uh oh, they've been hacked. I hope they have good backups." Then it dawned on me -- McAfee site advisor would be showing their warning on the search engine listing, not on the actual store site. Since we don't have that installed anywhere around here, I had the client email me some screen shots so I could see what was going on

Here's a Google search for Marie Sharp's Hot Sauce, a fairly popular product. The top three results in the product search have a yellow circle with an explanation point to signify a warning for those sites. That's mighty odd that both the client and their competitors results would show a warning. But it gets worse. Clicking on that warning icon shows this bad news:

Who are These People?

Our client explained to me that they had never heard of any of the users that supposedly were reviewing their site. I know they kill themselves over customer service, so the horror stories being told in the McAfee Site Advisor reviews just didn't make sense. I also happen to know that they don't spam, and I was very doubtful that they had been hacked and were distributing malware, spyware, or viruses.

So I clicked on the competitor's link. The same results. Not a different set of bad stories, but the exact results for the competitor as the client. Then the lightbulb went off. McAfee had made a mistake of monumental proportions.

McAfee had rated all of YAHOO.NET as dangerous.

Supreme Incompetence

Yahoo Stores can be hosted on a subdomain of yahoo.net. Their url looks like storename.stores.yahoo.net. I've heard there are over 100K stores using the Yahoo service. It's a lot of stores. And McAfee had taken a few complaints from a couple of specific stores and applied them to every store in the Yahoo store system. A quick google site search on a product category proved my hypothesis:

Yep, 31,000 results for a site search on cameras in the yahoo store system and McAfee marked every single one of them with a warning.

The level of apparent incompetence and recklessness on the part of McAfee is hard to believe. They are wrongly telling their users that these sites are dangerous, when it is completely untrue. The warning shows up right next to the Google result for that store. If you read the fine print you can see that they're talking about yahoo.net, but frankly most potential customers don't read the fine print. It's been 2 days now and our client has seen a dramatic drop off in sales. They're really being hurt by this.

It's the Little Guy That Gets Hurt

The client has contacted Yahoo support, who says they're working on it. The behavior started Tuesday afternoon after the earthquake, so perhaps that's related to it. I can imagine a situation where they rebooted some servers and forgot to apply a patch and now they're giving out wrong information. But frankly, this sure looks like libel by software. They're accusing people in a very public way of being spammers and distributors of malware and adware. And they're wrongly attributing customer complaints to that company.

Interestingly enough, the McAfee Site Advisor software only modified the google search results. Yahoo has a partnership with them to render the results from Yahoo instead of in the browser, and not surprisingly Yahoo isn't telling people that Yahoo.net is a supplier of malware and adware, run by spammers. So it's only killing 80% of the Yahoo Store's business since most of their search traffic comes from Google.

McAfee needs to fix this mistake, and fast. Otherwise they might find themselves with a pretty hefty legal liability from a lot of Yahoo store owners. And Yahoo needs to wake up and push McAfee to do it, because this is impacting the percentage they get from their Yahoo stores.

We did the Imacro Script to Add the Problogger Digg Friends the Easy Way earlier this week.

Now we've done the same thing for the giant 538 Twitter Users That Blog list that he put together.

You still need to install Imacro, but this time to make it easier you only need the FireFox version. You can click on the Imacro icon in our sidebar. Then just run this script. Be sure that you're already logged into Twitter before starting the script.

Thanks to Darren for putting this list together. This script will save you a lot of mouse clicks.

Darren Rowse at Pro-Blogger has collected Hundreds of Bloggers to Interact with on Digg and StumbleUpon. It's in the form of a bunch of links that you can visit and hit "Add Friend". That's a great list because these are all people who will most likely be interested in your message.

I suppose you could spend several hours adding all those friends and develop a good case of carpal tunnel, or you could just use an Imacro Script to Add Those Digg Friends. It will run through that entire list and click the "Add Friend" button for you.

If you don't have Imacro installed, go do that right away. You can click on the Imacro icon in our sidebar. Then just click the link to the script or download it using right click and run it in Imacro. If you don't know about Imacro, you're about to enter into a wider world.

Some people have expressed reservations in the comments over at Problogger that adding a lot of friends at once in Digg or StumbleUpon could get you banned. I'm not sure what they're basing that on, but our experience from dozens of people over several months is that Digg doesn't mind adding lots of friends. We're the ones who invented the Digg Friend Finder and now the PMS Social Suite, so if banning was going to occur we'd have seen it. YMMV.

Participating in voting blocks and gaming the system will get you banned, that's been documented. Adding lots of friends, on the other hand, is what those sites are designed to support.

I should have known this, but Fireboard has an RSS feed. If you had subscribed to the feed in our PMS Social Suite forum, you would have heard about this cool new planned feature.

You would also be able to see new features planned for our next release, which will include items 414, 409, 378, 411, 412, 408, and 358. No ETA, but 90% of this is working on our dev servers. Yes, you'll have to look through the forum to see what those are.

We've gotten a lot of feedback from our users about the PMS Social Suite. Some of been enhancements, others have been some pretty hard to find bugs. In the spirit of openness, we're going to publish the list of enhancement requests and outstanding defect reports we currently are tracking in our Bugzilla system.

You don't use Bugzilla? You really should take a look at it. We use Bugzilla internally for just about anything. In addition to being a great (and free) defect management system, we use it for all kinds of project tracking and workflow tasks. It can really improve your productivity.

We've started posting defect reports and enhancement requests in our PMS Social Suite Forum. If you run into a problem, this would be a good place to look for a solution or to report it. Of course, you can always just email us and we'll be glad to help out too.

The Current List

Here's what the current enhancement and defect list looks like:

We'd really appreciate your feedback, so if you have opinions on the relative importance of these items or have something else you'd like to see implemented, go ahead and reply in the forum.