A number of people have noticed that the Lt_Draper Twitter account is now sporting the Who Goes There Owl. In other words, it was suspended by Twitter for "breaking the rules." We'll point out that we've never done anything that is against Twitter's Terms of Service, but according to their terms, "We reserve the right, in accordance with any applicable laws, to refuse service to anyone for any reason at any time." They can terminate your account any time they please -- you haven't paid them any money and your account exists solely at their whim. Do a Google search for "Twitter Account Suspended" and you'll see a lot of people singing the Twitter Owl Blues.

Should I Be Worried That Don's Account Was Suspended?

At first glance, that might be cause for concern. If a popular account like the lt_draper account can get suspended, what does that mean for you?

In reality, Don gave his account so that others could live. We've always counseled our customers that if they're going to live on the dangerous side and aggressively market on Twitter they need to cover their bets by having several accounts. Lt_Draper was just one of many accounts we run here and we push the envelope very hard to find out what the limits are. With this particular account, we violated just about every rule we outlined in our previous post Stupid Twitter Tricks to Get Your Account Suspended.

• Certain Topics Tend to Draw Attention - This account was promoting articles about how to use automation on Twitter.
• Getting Blocked - This account was connected to an account on a forum where we took a rather unpopular stand with the rainbows, unicorns, and Skittles set. Some people were vocal about their intent to block and report as spam accounts that were taking the position that automation can be a useful marketing tool.
• Churning Follow and Unfollow - We were pretty much testing the upper limits on what we could get away with on this account.
• Hitting the Top 1,000 - Twitter seems to take a close look at accounts that hit around 20,000 followers, which is enough to put you into the top 1,000. Lt_Draper had just broken 28,000 followers.

So it's not shocking that the account got suspended. It didn't impact our business at all because we've been following our own advice. We've burned accounts before and we expect to burn them again. We're playing at the edge so you don't have to.

What You Should Take Away

There are some critical lessons you can learn:

• Have more than 1 Account - Yes, we sound like a broken record, but you really shouldn't put all your eggs in one basket. Twitter can terminate your account for any reason or no reason at all. And they do.
• Stay Under the Radar - When you get an account to around 15K followers it's a good time to start a new account. It's far more powerful to have 5 accounts with 15K followers than a single account with 75K followers.
• Stay Quiet - If you tweet unpopular things or take unpopular positions there will be spiteful people that will block you. Twitter looks at blocking activity as a vote against your account. So if it's a business account, stay quiet. Avoid the urge to tweet things like "David Beckham kicks like a girl."
• Don't use more than 1 Service at Time - We've seen some accounts get suspended and when we look at the google cache of their profile page it becomes evident that they were using several "free" services to enhance their account. The problem with that approach is that you don't know which service got you banned. If you want to try several services, then build several accounts and experiment. But mixing services is just pushing the limits.
• Let The Software Work - We've pushed the limits with several accounts to find out where they are. We've set our software up to stay within about 50% of those limits. Don't turn around and follow more people on your own or mass unfollow while the software is running on your account. You're busting carefully determined limits and asking for trouble.
• Be Patient - It's easy to get frustrated, especially when you're running up against the 2,000 Follower Barrier. The software will get you through that hump, let it work. If you really can't wait the week to ten days it will take to get past the hump, then run 10 accounts up to 2,000. That's by far the quickest route to being able to contact 20,000 people with your tweets.

This is part of what you pay for with our service - our willingness to create dozens of accounts and, through trial and error, discover what works, what doesn't work, and what really doesn't work. We also recognize that twitter has changing standards for what is allowable, so we'll always have a pipeline of twitter accounts at different levels (pre 2K, etc) that we manipulate and test on so that you can just use our service and concentrate on your marketing messages.

It's not us!  Twitter is currently unable to process follow and unfollow requests. Or perhaps they'll show up after a while. As of this afternoon, if you click follow on someone's profile it will say you're following them, until you click refresh in which case it will say you're not following them.

So yeah, our software hasn't added any users for you today. At least it was a computer that found that out instead of you spending your time on it.

We'll be back when they're back.

I don't know how many times I've said this, but I'll say it again. Don't use Twitter automation on an account that you can't afford to lose. If it's an account that you're personally invested in you shouldn't play with it. Don't bet something you can't afford to lose.

With that said, getting suspended on Twitter is not as nearly as common as some people would have you believe. Out of a sample of 650K Twitter accounts we've researched, about 2,700 of them were suspended. That's 0.4% -- pretty good odds. Out of the hundreds of accounts we've run through our system, we've seen about 1% of them get suspended. That's double the average, but you'd expect a higher rate among people willing to push the envelope. Whenever we see an account get banned, we look at the profile in the google cache and see what they were doing. They were all pushing the envelope. We've started to detect some trends of the type of activity that will get you suspended:

• Young Accounts Get Closer Scrutiny - Accounts that are a few days old and immediately zoom to follow 1,000/day will flag themselves for a suspension. An account without any updates or the default icon also draws attention. If you're starting with a fresh account, it's important that a high percentage of the first people that you follow follow you back. It's also important that you grow slowly until you get over the 2,000 follower hump. Then you can gain speed.
• Certain Topics Tend to Draw Attention - MLM, Email Marketing, Poker, Porn, etc combined with a young and aggressive profile will get the owl hovering.
• Automated Tweets - While it may seem like a cool trick to hook up a popular blog's (not your own) rss feed to TweetLater so that you've got automated tweets, Twitter seems to detect that you're only tweeting links, and duplicate ones at that. Likewise automatically tweeting the links from another social network such as all your Diggs or Stumbles and no other content will get their attention.
• Too Many @Replies or DMs - If you blast a marketing message via @reply or direct messages you'll attract attention. Yes, you can send up to 1,000 messages a day. Just don't make it a mass mailing.
• Getting Blocked - This is perhaps the number one indicator to Twitter of an abusive account. If people are blocking you and enough people do it they will take a look at you.
• Churning Follow and Unfollow - Don't try the cheap shot of following someone and then unfollowing them an hour later. That strategy used to work -- enough people were using services that automatically followed people back and those had enough of a lag that you could fool them into a one-way follow. But it's pretty clear that Twitter is looking for that behavior. To be safe, don't unfollow someone for at least 72 hours after you've followed them. And don't unfollow more than 5% of your total in any one day.

If you're using the PMS Social Suite you won't run into problems of following too quickly or churning. We enforce carefully formulated ratios on our automated activity to stay within the limits. If one of our users gets blocked by someone, no other of our users will try to follow them. All of the accounts in the system get the benefit of data gained from all the other accounts. Keep tracking of all that and making all those calculations by hand is a tall order, so automation is key.

What you do on your own time is up to you. But again, you're pushing the envelope by using automation. If you're a customer you've seen the giant gains you can get. But it's not risk free. So don't risk something you can't afford to lose. And don't push it even further by engaging in those other behaviors unless you're ok with playing the game of constantly getting your accounts suspended.

The Bottom Line

The bottom line is that your Twittering needs to be genuine. Automation is great for making the first contact, but that's not a license to spam. You should be using this strategy to make contact with more people. You still need to move them into other touch points in your sales system such as your blog, newsletters, product offers, etc. That doesn't mean build up a huge list of followers and then start tweeting only affiliate links at them. You've got to build up credibility. Throw in some useful information and links to other sources. You'll find that people are a lot more likely to click on the links you need them to.

We haven't had too many complaints about our service, but the most frequent complaint we get seems to be "Your software works too well!"

A lot of people have been surprised at how many followers they pick up, even with the free trial. The average seems to be about 1,000 new followers over the course of a week. For a few people, this has been enough to decide they don't want any more.

There's an easy solution to this: just go to your Dashboard, click Edit, then click Delete. The next day you'll get an automated message reminding you that you need to enter data if you want the service to work, and then you'll be done. Any record we have of your Twitter information will be gone and you won't end up in the next processing batch.

You Might Not Be Thinking About This Right

We've said several times that you shouldn't use this service for your primary, personal account. Aside from the danger that you could get banned (a small risk, but it can happen and you've been warned), it also means that your personal timeline will see a huge influx of followers. If you don't want to see that, then just create a separate business account and run that through the system. Don't mix business and pleasure.

It also comes down to diversifying your social portfolio. Do you really want to put all your eggs in one basket? If you're targeting five different niches, then you should have five different Twitter accounts -- at least!

Twitter automation is really hot right now. The strategy is working quite well. Will it work forever? Probably not. The only thing constant in Internet Marketing is change. You're not paying any money to Twitter, which means they can do pretty much whatever they want and you don't have recourse. Let's say things change dramatically in six months. If you've been following a particular strategy on a single account and that account becomes worthless, you've lost everything. But if you've got several accounts with different strategies, it's like riding out a downturn in the market with a diversified portfolio. It just doesn't make sense, from a business perspective, to put all your bets on a single account.

How to Keep Track of it All

There are lots of ways to deal with a flood of data in your twitter stream. If you're using the Twitter html interface, you're in a horse and buggy while being passed in the autobahn. It's quaint, but ultimately dangerous.

Our personal preference for a client is Tweetdeck. There are others, that's just the first one we came across that really worked well. If you've got a huge number of people you're following but are only interested in a few key areas, just create a real time search on those keywords. Tweetdeck will display tweets in a separate column that match that search. Now you're right on top of things in real time. You can have a huge net and personal interaction with the key prospects you're looking for.

Let's say there is a small group of people that you really want to follow. You can create a group and display just tweets from that group in a column.

Your RSS reader is also a great way to keep track of tweets in near real time. Look at a Twitter profile page. Down at the bottom of the right sidebar you'll see an rss feed for that user, such as Lt_Draper's RSS feed. You can load that into your rss reader and you'll see the tweets from that user arrive.

Or perhaps you'd like to follow a group of people with RSS. Just create a Yahoo Pipe like Don and Oliver's RSS Feeds. That pipe shows how simple it is to create a mashup of multiple RSS feeds. Click "Edit Source" and you can see how easy it was to build.

You Can Still Be Personal and Popular

There seems to be the misconception among many Internet Marketers that you have to make a choice between having a lot of followers and having quality followers. There's a group of people that think hand picked, delicately crafted follower lists have higher quality than huge lists gained through automation.

Anybody would agree that specifically targeted leads are better than shotgun leads in their eventual quality. But there doesn't have to be a choice between the strategies. Why can't you use automation to build up a large following while you're using manual methods to specifically target people? Automating just means that you have more time for higher value activities. I'll take a list of 30,000 followers, about 1,000 of which were carefully targeted, over a list of 1,000 carefully targeted followers any day.

The benefit to that approach is social proof. If you've got a larger following, the people you follow will see you as more credible than the guy with 60 followers. If you're concerned that people will be put off by your huge following, then run an account that is only handcrafted leads and a few others that are automated.

Find out for yourself. Experiment, measure, and repeat until you find what works. Just don't let the preconceptions you've formed without experience or data color what your'e seeing.

Oh yeah, there's a free trial available: PMS Social Suite. You didn't really expect me to forget to plug what we're selling?

Are you wasting your days whale watching? No, I don't mean spending time on vacation. I mean that special brand of fun you can only have when Twitter is acting completely out of sorts like it has all afternoon today. Half the time a page load times out. A few times they've even put up the "Twitter is over capacity message" but haven't even served up a fail whale.

We're Used to It

As long time Twitter users we're used to it. Is there any other web business where users would put up with such a high rate of failure? Slow response times and sporadic failures are a weekly occurence with Twitter. When Google went down for an hour it made huge news, but people shrug off Twitter going down like a piece of moldy bread. The beauty of it, from Twitter's standpoint, is that when they're having trouble, their user's can't even tweet about it! And when they come back people make a collective sigh of relief and go right back to Twittering.

It's a Problem if You're in Business

The problem with whale watching is that if you're depending upon Twitter to promote your business these outages cost you time. If you're following a manual methodology for adding followers you're going to eat up a lot of time. If you're trying to add twitter followers, the key is to keep up a steady amount of activity, every day.

Let's say you've become completely motivated and want to add a lot of Twitter Followers so you can have an effective marketing impact. You decide that every day you're going to spend a few hours following people on Twitter. Unfortunately, when the Fail Whale surfaces it's easy just to quit that activity and move on to something else. The chances are you'll forget to come back to your Twitter Following task. The next day you do a little less, and within a few weeks you've completely stopped. In another month you decide "Gee, I really ought to get back to that."

The problem with your manual method is that your competitors might not be doing it. Instead of spending an hour a today for a month following people on Twitter, they might have spent $39.95 for a month of the PMS Social Suite and had the autopilot run for several hours a day against an advanced database of people targeted within their niche and likely to follow them back. Perhaps you're proud of your 2,500 followers. They're adding that many followers every week.

What you're really saying by insisting upon spending an hour a day on something you could automate is that your time is only worth $1.33/hour. If that is all your time is truly worth, then perhaps this internet marketing thing isn't your cup of tea...

When the fail whale beaches itself a server based automation system will slog through. If you've installed software on your own machine to do the same thing, your environment slows down with Twitter. A server based solution that you can just set on autopilot and forget about it makes the most sense.

I'm Afraid My Account Will Get Banned

That's a reasonable fear. Which is why you shouldn't put all of your eggs in one basket. You shouldn't have a single account, you should have a stable of accounts, targeted at the various niches you're going after. If you've invested a lot of time and money building a single account, don't automate it. Create another account and use the automation to build it's followers. When you tweet, use the new account to retweet what you just said.

We have not had a customer get an account banned as a result of using our software. But obviously we can't guarantee that it won't happen. Twitter doesn't seem to mind the kinds of things our software does. Our customers have added 330,142 followers in that last two weeks. That's a lot of activity. Twitter has every motive to have as much activity among their user base as possible. They need to overcome the Oprah drop off effect (A lot of people signed up after Oprah talked about Twitter, and a month later their accounts went dormant). But that could change and Twitter could go to war against the power users much like Digg did. So don't put your eggs all in one basket. Get a lot of eggs, and a lot of baskets.

The pros in this business are all using automation. If you're shying away from automation because you're afraid of losing your account with 500 hard earned followers, you're getting your lunch eaten by the competition and you don't even know about it. They're getting more clicks than you have followers. You can't compete with that without automation.

Go ahead and sign up for a free account. Just register and click on the PMS Social Suite link. You know you want to.

How would you like to add several hundred twitter followers every day, forever? Without adding any additional work to your day? Without installing any software? Just put it on autopilot and walk away?

If that's an interesting proposition, you should read through this entire article.

New Twitter Limits

A while back, Twitter published some limits on following people on Twitter. The key numbers from this are:

• 1,000 per day - That's the limit for the number of people anyone can follow in a day. It doesn't matter if you're Ashton or just Joe Marketer, 1,000 is the limit. That applies to the services that follow people back for you as well.
• 2,000 people to start - You can follow up to 1,000 people per day until you hit 2,000 people. Twitter doesn't publish the next number, but we can verify that it's 10%. You can follow 10% more people than are following you after you've followed 2,000 people.

A Different Approach to Fighting Spammers

While Twitter does indeed go after spammers, they aren't as heavy handed as Digg. They don't seem to ban on a whim. Instead, they let the natural limits of the system determine what people can do. This is more effective than Digg's strategy, which seems to have been to make their system as unusable as possible for marketers. Twitter seems to realize that marketers are a key component of their ecosystem and have helped them grow.

Internet Marketers are like the helpful bacteria in your digestive system. You'd think they'd be bad for you, but if you eradicate them you'll end up sick. Social networks that take a heavy handed approach towards discouraging marketers are doing the same thing.

If you're a long time Promote My Suite Social Suite User, you'll notice some big changes that just went into effect. For one thing, we've dropped all the Digg support. They just didn't seem to be interested, and it wasn't worth fighting the constant battles to get a share of a declining market. Twitter is clearly outpacing Digg these days, so we thought it made more sense to put our efforts into a platform that was actually friendly to internet marketers.

What do the Limits Mean to You?

The new following limits aren't that big a deal to internet marketers (honest ones, at least). 1,000 people a day is a lot of follows. That's 30,000 people you could follow in a month if you were willing to put the time in. If you could get 80% of them to follow you back you'd be adding 24,000 followers a month. It wouldn't take you very long to be a real player.

The problem is most internet marketers don't work like that. They're chronically short on attention. They'll try something for a couple of days or maybe even a week, and then move on to the next shiny thing that pops up. It takes an overwhelming amount of discipline to pound your keyboard through 1,000 profiles every day, cull out the ones that aren't following you after a few days, and keep that up over the long term.

Put it on Autopilot

That's why the new PMS Social Suite is so hot! You can build your twitter following without any of that drudgery. Instead, you log into the system once, enter your twitter account information, and you're done. Our servers will take care of the rest. You can just wait for the status emails to tell you how you're doing or visit the site periodically and look at some pretty graphs.

And more importantly, you can spend your time interacting with people and doing real marketing instead of trying to make tools work and clicking lots of buttons.

Check it out: PMS Social Suite. There's a free version for registered users too!

We are very pleased to announce that Digg and Promote My Site will be partnering to provide Digg's next generation of power user tools. This intiative represents a change in direction for Digg and will be a significiant benefit to the internet marketing community.

Kevin Rose may have said "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. In the past we've taken the postion that power users and marketers tend to harm the Digg community, so we've taken steps to make sure that their efforts are not successful. But given the economic times, it only makes sense to explore as many revenue opportunities as we can find. Beer is expensive and we can't just rely upon a bunch of teenagers to keep clicking those snorg tee ads to keep the lights on around here. It's time to let the professionals get to work and start generating some real revenue."

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but insider sources hinted that it was an all cash deal. Under the agreement, Digg will license Promote My Site's previously discontinued suite of power user digging scripts and integrate them into the site in a new product christened the Digg/PMS Suite. For a monthly subscription fee of $99.95, power users will be able to promote their stories on Digg without interference from system administrators or that pesky "Whoa Cowboy" message. Buries, while they will still appear to register on the site, will be ineffective against users of the Digg/PMS Suite and the users will be notified of who is buring their stories. Digg/PMS Suite users will also receive an allowance of 10 "zaps" a month. These "zaps" can be used to ban members of the Digg mafia that only comment and do not submit any useful content to the site. This feature is expected to greatly improve the user experience for all concerned. Futhermore, any previously banned user will be able to have their account reinstated by purchasing a subscription to the Digg/PMS Suite.

A release date for the enhanced Digg/PMS Suite was not disclosed, but it is expected to be in the vicinity of April 1, 2010. In the meantime, users purchasing a subscription to Promote My Site's PMS Social Suite will be in line for a discount on the Digg product if and when it is released.

Most people that talk about strategies for using analytics on Digg and other social networks are after the holy grail of a front page. I think that's misguided.

The Front Page Can Rock

First, let's talk about the benefits of a front page.

• Traffic - A ton of it. A front page on Digg can crush your server. You'll get a ton of people to see your site.
• Rankings - The scuttlebutt in SEO circles these days is that Google is tracking traffic via their toolbar, and having a lot of traffic actually helps you perform better in the SERPs. It's a very difficult hypothesis to prove either way, but from what I've seen the rich do indeed get richer.
• Links - The more people that see your site, the more likely some blogger is to give you a natural link.

More Trouble Than It's Worth?

A front page is nice if you can get it, but in fact it may be a lot more trouble than it's worth. Let's talk about some of the downsides:

• Lack of Conversions - The flood of traffic you get from a front page typically doesn't convert. The bounce rate is extremely high since the typical Digger isn't looking for your offer. The kind of people that surf the social media sites don't sit there with their credit cards at the ready.
• Commercial Offers are Seen as Spam - It's almost impossible to go front page with a commercial offer, so your link bait usually has to be on a domain that has a link to your offer. So while you may be building a strong backlink, you aren't geting strong traffic.
• Bandwidth Costs - You'll have to have a lot of bandwidth available to handle the storms of traffic if you're successful, which can be expensive if the traffic isn't translating directly into revenue.
• Time Tradeoffs - With a strong profile and participation in a few key groups you can get 50 votes on most any story with 5-10 minutes of work. But getting past the Digg mafia to the front page can mean babysitting that story for 24 hours. Just look at the cost benefit and thing about how that time could be used elsewhere.

Lots of Singles, Few Home Runs

Given the choice, would you rather have a player that hits .800 but only gets singles, or a home run hitter with a .050 average? Being able to always get on base is a lot better than racking up the strikeouts with a few home runs inbetween.

That's not to say that you shouldn't want to get to a front page, just don't make it your life's work. I know people that are completely consumed by getting to the front page, and they get visibly depressed when it doesn't happen.

Submitting a story and getting 1 or 2 votes is pretty much useless. Why do votes matter? Each vote is really an internal link on Digg to your article's page. Sites with a heavy amount of internal links but very few links to the page that links to your article won't pass much link juice. It's even more powerful if the votes you're getting are from powerful users with toolbar pagerank. This is a key reason why those programs that autosubmit your article to 1,000s of social networks are pretty much useless.

There's no way to prove it, but from what we've seen the magic line seems to be around 50 votes. Less than that and there isn't enough link juice coming from the site to push your article up the SERPs. More than that and you can see some surprising results.

This climb up the SERPs you'll see is short lived. As fast as the article goes up, it's also likely to go down just as fast. The entire scenario can play out in 2-3 days. But that's true if you hit the front page as well, so it makes sense to have a steady stream of singles rather than always trying to hit the home run.

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.