Managing Shouts isn't the only thing we've improved in the PMS Social Suite. We've also made a number of enhancements to the manage friends tab. The major features of this release are:

• Calculating Deadwood - what percentage of your submits does a friend Digg, and how much do you Digg them back?
• Welcome Messages - An easy method for the care and feeding of new fans
• Shouting - Send a shout to a group of friends
• Go To Friend Page - more options for which page to visit
• Multi Digg Submits - now you can Digg the submits of a group of friends

BTW, some users have been confused by the fact that the PMS Social Suite shows up in the "Free SEO Tools" section in the left sidebar. It's in the right place, because there is a free version of this product. You can do a number of useful things with it, but if you click on something that's only in the premium version you'll get the message telling you that it's a premium function. You must be a registered user to have access to the "freemium" products.

New Features in Manage Friends

Let's take a look at the new "Manage Friends" tab in the PMS Social Suite:

Welcome to Being My Fan

The first thing you'll notice is the new "Welcomed Status" filter and "Toggle Welcome Msg" button. This was an idea submitted by a user. The concept is that when you get a new fan you'll want to send them a welcome message. The other day I received a very nice welcome from a digg friend:

Thanks for becoming a fan. I figure something about my diggs must have piqued your interest, so please take a look at my favorites and digg them if you like them. The favorites are the first 3 submissions on this page.

That's a nice touch. But it could be a bit tedious to maintain if you're trying to build a very large friend network, so we've added a feature that you can mark your friends as "welcomed". When you get a new fan, you'll want to send them a nice shout and then mark them as welcomed and you won't commit the faux pas of welcoming them twice.

Shouting Efficiently

The next thing you'll notice is the entire section at the bottom of the screen for sending shouts. Just click on a user (or multi-select many users), put some text into the Shout Text field, and specify a minimum and maximum number of seconds to wait between shouts. Click Send shout and an Imacro script will fire that shouts to each of those friends.

Keep in mind that you can generally only shout to mutual friends and fans since most people turn off their incoming shouts except to friends. If you shout to someone that won't accept your shout, the script will generate an error and keep going. Don't worry, just let it fail and move on.

We specify a waiting period between shouts because depending upon the speed of your internet connection the Digg server might think you've become a flooding attack and try to trip you up. Waiting 30-60 seconds (the default) seems to not be a problem.

No, this isn't a spam machine. It takes quite a bit of time to run, so it's really only useful for things like a welcome message. If you really need to blast to 200 people at a time, you'd be better off using Digg's own functionality. Likewise, if you only need to send a message to 1 or 2 people, you'd be faster to just go to their page and click "Send Shout" on their Digg page.

Visiting Your Friends

The "Go To Friend" button has had a set of radio buttons added to it that indicate which page you'd like to visit. Selecting "Profile" just takes you to their profile page (the old functionality). But now you can jump directly to their submissions, diggs, shouts send, or incoming shouts. Ok, it's not rocket science, but it does save you quite a few keystrokes or mouse clicks when you want to go check out what someone is submitting.

BTW, the Greasemonkey Script to Help Digg Your Incoming Shouts has also been upgraded to add the Digg buttons on the submissions and diggs pages of users. This is a bit of overlap with the "Digg Friends Easy" script upon which it was based, so if you're running that script too you'll want to pick which one. You must have our script installed in order to use the premium Manage Shouts functions, so guess which one we suggest?

Getting Rid of the Deadwood

What's the best kind of friend to have on Digg? It's someone who will Digg your submissions, but not too much. If someone Diggs 100% of what you submit, Digg will decide that you've become a voting block. They then discount that vote -- it still counts, but not nearly as much. What you'd really like to have is someone that will consistently Digg around 20% of what you submit. Those people are gold. On the other hand, friends that never vote for your submissions are pretty much worthless. And since Digg limits you to 1,000 friends, after you hit that number (quite easy to do with this tool), you'll going to need to start culling out the deadwood.

So how do you tell how much someone Diggs you? Select a friend (or many) in the grid, then click "Calc Deadwood". It takes a while to run -- when you think about it, there's a lot to do -- but when it comes back you'll have the "Digg Percent" and "Dugg Back Percent" columns filled in the grid. Digg percent tells what percentage of the last 100 of your submissions were dugg by that friend. Dugg Back Percent tells you what percentage of their last 100 submissions that you've dugg.

As you can see in the screen capture, I've been "stalking" some new friends. My filter is set to Friend=Yes and Mutual=No, so these are people that haven't friended me back yet. Notice the number is pretty small (13). That's because I've cut out the deadwood pretty aggressively. If I friend someone I give them about 3 weeks to friend me back or start digging my submissions. If they just ignore me, they get unfriended. You can see from the Digg Percentages that a few of them have starting Digging my submissions, even though they haven't friended me back yet. A non-mutual friend that Diggs your stuff is as good as a mutual friend, perhaps even better. So you wouldn't want to cull those out unless you had much better friend "in the pipeline." See, it's just like high school.

Digging Others Submissions

Nothing is so attractive in another as them finding us attractive. I don't remember who said that, but they were right. It goes double on Digg. If you want to get someone's attention, start digging their submissions. Better yet, digg their submissions when they've only got a few votes. You'll stand out. Keep it up, and after a while they'll friend you back and digg your stuff. If they don't, it's time to move on. There are plenty of fish on Digg.

The previous version only implemented that functionality for a single friend at a time. Now you can multi-select several friends and click the Digg Submits button and an Imacro script will fire that Diggs their last N submissions, within a range of the current number of votes on that submission. Give lots of desireable friends that treatment and you're sure to become popular!

Where we Get This Stuff

Most of these features came as suggestions in feedback from our users. If you've got an idea for some useful functionality, drop us a line or comment on the blog and we'll throw it into the pile of stuff we want to do.

So given all the time that this can save you, why haven't you upgraded to premium yet?