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.

The latest meme in the Twittersphere has been a complaint about people that use services such as Tweet Later to send automated thank you notes to new followers on Twitter. SocialToo took it so seriously that they dropped that capability from their service. Chris Brogan, Amber Naslund, and Tim Walker have all written on the subject. In fact, probably hundreds of bloggers have written on the subject. I'm now probably going to provide you with the only article in existence that argues against the commonly held belief that auto-DMs are evil.

Trust Us, We're in Marketing

We use Twitter for business. We've written several articles that question the business viability of Twitter, so rather than being on Twitter for peace, love, rainbows, and unicorns, we're there for marketing while they're still around. The proposition to our followers is straightforward. We tweet useful information (and the occasional funny stuff) in the hopes that people will follow us and periodically click on the links to our blog posts. We write blog posts so that people will be drawn to our blog and hopefully purchase some of our products. Once people get to know us they're likely to spend some money with us. In the end it's just a numbers game. If we can't sell anything then none of those other activities make sense. So there's going to be some commercial content mixed in with our message. Anyone that is approaching Twitter (or blogging) for any other purpose has someone else paying their bills, because if you can't turn a profit it's not sustainable.

The Commercials Pay for the Content

So when you receive an auto-DM after you've followed someone, don't whine about it. It's the commercials that pay for the programming.

The people that rant against auto-DMs have something else in mind. If you dig deeper, you'll find out that they also have a problem with the concept of advertising on Twitter in general. As Tim Walker pointed out in the discussion in the comments section we had on his blog, several blogging purists were against people that were getting into blogging to make money as well. If people find auto-DMs offensive, imagine what the reaction would be to corporately sponsored tweets! Is there really any difference between a corporate tweet advertisement and the auto-DM?

Answering the Arguments

Let's look at some of the arguments that have been made against auto-DMs. I'll admit that these are valid if you're on Twitter for recreation, but if you're on Twitter for business networking then I think it's a different situation. Here are some of the arguments that Chris Brogan made in his article:

• Irks me because it's a robot. So I suppose he's stopped watching television and listening to radio? Those advertisements are automatic as well.
• Annoys me because you ask me to click your junk. That's funny, given this and this from just today. So a DM that is just to the person that initiated a follow is annoying, but pimping links to your blog and ebooks to all of your followers is ok?
• Tempts me to go back and unfollow you on principle That's the marketplace of Twitter. If you don't like what someone has done, or what they tweet, or don't find value, then just don't follow them.
• If you're too busy to be an actual human on a social network, don't join another social network. That argument would only make sense if the people that auto-DM only auto-DM and don't provide any other value. But since he initiated the follow in order to get the auto-DM back, he must have been interested in their profile. So what he's really saying is that he wants the information he gets by following for free, and doesn't have time to be bothered with a "commercial" that makes the content profitable to the provider. Twitter should be about Win-Win.
• Follower count doesn't matter. What matters is who you follow. Probably the biggest lie told by the "Twitter Gurus." Without followers, you're just talking to yourself. There's no point in tweeting if there's no one to listen. If all of his followers left him I suspect he'd stop tweeting because it wouldn't be worth his time.

• Conversations are way better than "new blog post" tweets. I agree, but the "new blog post" tweets pay for the conversations. Sure, you don't want to follow someone that only posts the commercials, but there's nothing wrong with mixing those into the conversations.
• What service are you doing me by direct messaging me sending me your links? Quite a bit, if the DM that is sent has truly useful information in it. I agree, don't just send a link that's already in your profile, but something special is, well, something special. And what's so bad about getting the fairly common DM of "Thanks for following?" Are we all so highly stressed and easily offended that the mere courtesy of thanking someone rankles us?

Now let's take a look at Amber Naslund's arguments:

• If you hit me with a spammy sounding DM right when we get connected, I instantly think your community participation is a sham. Except that you've read through my tweets and have already come to a conclusion about following me. You've said "I'd like some free information please" and are upset about the tip jar on the counter.
• You don't know a thing about me yet, except what you read on my profile. How on earth do you know that what you offer is of value to me in the least? I don't, other than you followed me and that people who follow me tend to be interested in what I have to offer, which is why the auto-DM to followers is a reasonable message channel. Only a small percentage of the people that see a commercial on TV will be interested in the offer either. It's a numbers game. Getting upset about it is demanding labor for free. You want to see the work product of the tweets of the person you're following, but you won't accept anything except a 100% customized message?
• I'm a very social person, and dig meeting new people. Truly. So I'm excited that you're following me. Actually, she's got that backwards. She's receiving the auto-DM because she followed them, not vice versa. The only way you can get these messages is to follow someone.
• If your business proposition is more important than saying hello and getting acquainted, then it's clear to me that you don't feel the same way about people as I do, which means we'll probably have little in common anyway. We already said hello. You read my profile and clicked the follow button. You said "Hi" and I said "Hi" back and handed you a business card. That's completely acceptable behavior at a business networking function like a trade show. If you're at a different kind of party then I am, then just unfollow and walk away. But you came to me and said "Hi", I didn't initiate things, so stop whining when I act in a reasonable manner for the context I'm operating in.
• Like many, many other people, I do business with people I like and trust. But like and trust are not instant affinities. So you like and trust and have a personal relationship with your phone company, your power company, your grocer, and your mortgage processor? I'll bet the last time you filled up your gas tank you did it through a completely robotic interface. You can't build up trust merely through a conversation anyway -- trust depends upon performance. And frankly, I find it really hard to trust someone that claims to be completely altruistic and providing everything for free, when I know they have to be making money through their activity somehow in order to survive. I'd much rather deal with people that are up front about why they're here.

I don't disagree with the points that Tim Walker from Hoovers made. Go read his article and the comments below -- we had a very civil exchange. At Promote My Site, our approach to Twitter comes down to a numbers game. We picked up 6,000 followers on the Lt_Draper account in February. We had an auto-DM set up that thanked people for following and asked them to add our rss feed to their reader. We've had several people tell us that our rss feed is hard to find, so we thought that was reasonable "extra" information to put in the welcoming DM. Evidently a lot of people thought so too, because our feedburner stats more than doubled during the month.

Compare that to trying to manually research every follower (click their profile, click their website link, read their recent tweets and really get to know them). A very cursory approach might take 5 minutes each. That's 500 hours of labor for the month. Oliver and I are workaholics, but there's just no way we're going to be able to handle that. So instead we use an auto-DM. It probably does offend a certain number of people, but I'm guessing they weren't potential clients anyway. If you're so wrapped up in the idea that everything on the internet should be free and you don't want advertising interrupting your flow of information, then you're probably not going to purchase a subscription to our site.

So don't follow. But quit whining.