I can't tell you how many times I've seen messages like this on the profile page of a Digg user:

Add me as your friend. I'll digg your shouts if you digg mine. I'm an active digger and I'm always looking for people to reciprocate shares/shouts. Active diggers only please.

There's only one small problem with this. Votes from shouts are mostly useless.

Votes from your friends are heavily discounted. Votes from shouts are discounted even more. This was probably a result of Digg trying to crack down on gaming of the system. If your strategy is to Digg your friends shouts heavily and then shout your stories, you won't have a lot of success. Take a look at MakiMaki's profile:

Add me as a friend if you wanna. I never shout stories. Not even once. So read and digg only what you like.

MakiMaki understands how the system works. He doesn't shout -- he expects his friends to look at his submissions and vote from that. You'd do well to follow his lead.

But Shouts Get My Story Seen!

The biggest argument in favor of shouts is that even though the votes are discounted, they at least will get your story noticed by enough people to give it a critical mass to get it to the next level. The converse is that if you've got 50 people that you can count on to Digg your story from a shout, you're only getting the benefit of about 5 votes. Wouldn't it be better to get half of them to allow you to send them an AIM or an email asking for a vote? Then you'd get the full strength of their vote and you'd be well on your way to popularity.

The better argument in favor of shouts is that you don't care about making the front page. If you can get 50 votes on a story from a shout, that's 50 incoming internal links for the search engines to see and you've accomplished your goals. That's completely valid, but wouldn't it be better to spend your time building your relationships outside of the purview of Digg and getting full strength from your votes?

Build Relationships, Not Friend Lists

Hopefully the recent spate of bannings on Digg has taught social marketers the valuable lesson that it's much more important to build up a set of relationships rather than a friend list owned by the social network. If you were a banned digger and you didn't maintain an offline database of your friendships and how to contact them, you were pretty much out of luck when the ban came down. On the other hand, if you were investing in relationships, building up another powerful account is only a new IP address away.

Now, if only there was a way to find out the email addresses, twitter names, and AIM addresses of your friends list with just the push of a button. Hmmmm......stay tuned!