What exactly does a social media professional do when they're shepherding a story to the front page of a news site? Aside from all of the other support activities that surround having strong profiles, being an active member in the community, and building off site relationships with as many people as they can, the tactics for getting to the front page really just consist of:

• Prepare the article. This may sound simplistic, but there are a lot of factors to consider. For instance, many people make the mistake of not putting a "Digg This" badge at the top of the article in plain sight even though they're targeting Digg. If you're going to promote an article, you have to make it easy for people to vote. Whatever sites you're targeting (Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Propeller, etc), make sure that it's easy for your users to vote for your story.
• Submit the article. There are certain times of the day that articles should be submitted, and you should only submit from a profile that can carry the article. Which also means not always submitting your own articles but getting someone powerful to do it for you.
• Solicit Your Friends. The professionals will maintain a list of people that they can call upon for votes when they need them. Newbies often make the mistake of emailing/IMing everyone they know when they first submit the article, which means that the article gets an initial burst of activity (from the same people all the time) and then dies out. The algorithms on most sites will recognize this pattern. What the algorithms are really looking for is a steady increase in interest. The professionals work their list throughout the first 24 hours until they get to the front page. If you've got 200 people you can ask for votes, you'll want to spread that out to 10-15 votes per hour.
• Defend Your Turf. Get some of your friends to make positive comments on the article early on. The bandwagon effect can be quite powerful. Especially if you're submitting material that is somewhat commercial in nature, it's only a matter of time before somebody comments on the article about why it is lame and they're burying it. Get on that right away and get several people to comment back defending the value of the article. Keep a reserve of votes that you can call on because when the "Digg Mafia" tries to knock your story out you'll need votes to fight back. (Note that while Digg is the example, this behavior happens across most social networks.)

Lather, rinse, repeat. I've seen pros literally babysite an article around the clock to get a front page. People think that the top social media marketers just drop articles on sites and watch the traffic roll in. In fact, it's very hard work. Getting to the front page can bring in a ton of traffic, but it's far from easy.

But I Don't Have Time For This!

If you're an internet marketer then being a social media pro probably requires more time than you've got available. There are a lot more components to your business. So your options are:

• Outsource Your Social Media Marketing - You can hire other people to do this part of the business for you. The going rate for a guaranteed front page on Digg seems to be about $3,000 USD. That may seem like a lot of money, but a successful front page on Digg can bring 100,000 visitors, so your cost is about $0.03/click, which is a lot cheaper than most pay per click alternatives. While the people making big money don't blink at those numbers, it's a little steep for those who are just starting out in internet marketing.
• Ignore Social Media Marketing - This is what most internet marketers seem to be doing. Or they just do a very bad job of it. Submitting your article to a few social networking sites and getting 10 votes on your story is useless. Sure, you'll get a link, but the search engines are smart enough to calculate the internal link strength on the social network pointing to your article and will conclude that the link shouldn't be very strong. Worse yet, if the search engines look at the 100 sites that you spammed your bookmarks to with an automated tool and link that up to your profile that shows you're just self submitting, you could be in for the dreaded "Google Slap." Google warned everyone about this last year, so it's only a matter of time before they go after the social link spammers the same way they did the paid linkers. One wonders if there is a blackhat technique that could be based on submitting your competition's sites in a spammy fashion -- all the more reason that you can't just ignore social networking.
• Pick the Middle Ground - You don't have to duke it out with the "Big Boys" in social media to be a success. As we've explained several times before, there is a ton of value to be had from having moderately popular stories. On Digg, the line seems to be around 50 Diggs. Other sites will vary, but the key is that your submissions get enough votes so that while they may not make the front page, they collect enough internal links from powerful profiles that the search engines conclude that the story page is important. If it's a "dofollow" site like Digg, so much the better. But even if you aren't getting SEO value from the links, having the social media link appear in the SERPs is a very good thing. First, what do you think a user is likely to do once they visit that page? Yep, click on your link. And if that page is taking up space in the top of the SERPS, it's a position that your competition doesn't get. A competitor that was comfortably sitting at #2 can find themselves pushed off the first page with well supported social media pages.

Your key in pursuing this middle ground strategy obviously is to find ways to efficiently gather a lot of votes for your stories without it taking over your life. Our PMS Social Suite, while it is certainly powerful enough to get you to the front page (and it's what some professionals use for just that!), it's real value is in allowing you to spend just 10 minutes a day to build a powerful profile that can get you into the sweet spot on Digg.

But there's another way to hit that sweet spot, and it works on every social network, not just Digg. If you've wondered why our blogging frequency has gone down as of late, the reason is that we've been feverishly working on a new product. We're almost done and getting ready for beta testing. It's going to be free, it will completely rock your world, and you should stay tuned.