Last August we did a post on Voting Rings in Social Networks. At the time there were a number of sites trying to cater to people that wanted to exchange votes with other social network users. The "industry" has changed quite a bit since then, and it bears re-examination.

First, let's define what we mean by a vote exchange site. These are websites that allow their users to "trade" their votes on social networks for votes for their own sites. It formalizes the "I'll scratch your back if you'll scratch mine" paradigm in which most social network users participate. While when building up a friend list on Digg or StumbleUpon it is expected that your friends will vote for your stories in exchange for you voting on theirs, these sites formalize that process. They track who is voting on what and make sure that your time is not wasted by voting for submissions by other users that don't return the favor.

Isn't This Evil?

The social media purists will scream "Spammers!" when they see these sites. To the people that use these sites for the love of the social web and not for marketing it probably seems that way. But for those marketers not riding unicorns and chasing rainbows, it's just a fact of life.

We're not going to pass judgement on these activities. Some of these sites proclaim that "you should not vote for things you don't like" in order to avoid violating the TOS of the social networks. The plain and simple fact is that a lot of vote exchanging takes place in social networking. The top social network marketers are all doing it, if not explicityly through one of these voting rings then implicitly in the relationships that they develop. If you think you can compete with them without undertaking this kind of activity, then perhaps social network marketing is not for you.

Review of The Leading Sites

Interestingly enough, the sites we spotted last August are mostly still around. That's amazing given that Digg's legal team has been active and sent a cease and desist letter to uSocial.net, a site that claims to be able to sell Diggs, Stumbles, and Props.

All of these sites have some problems in common:

• You Don't Know Who You're Voting With - Everybody that uses these sites is in one giant pool. If Digg decided to go after one of these sites, all they would have to do is sign up, submit a few articles, and then see who votes on them. We have very good reason to believe that these social networks do exactly that.
• The Article Quality is Poor - Since you don't know the other members in your voting ring on these sites, you'll see a lot of "Cheap Viagra" and "Hot Babes" type submissions that you'll be asked to vote on. If you're using a throwaway social voting account to do the votes then that isn't so bad, but you can't build up your primary account using these sites. And there's a lot of junk to wade through which makes using the sites difficult. And if the social networks want to find people to ban, a good place to start is the people voting for those spammy submissions.
• You Could Get Sold Out - Given the "fly by night" nature of some of these sites, do you really think that if one of these rich social networks offered the webmaster a few thousand dollars for a copy of their user list they'd keep mum?
• They Might Leave a Footprint - Most of these sites have you click on a link to take you to the story to vote. The problem with that is that if they haven't handled setting the referrer correctly, where you came from may very well show up in the logs of the social networking sites. Again, you'll be signing yourself up for a trip to ban city.
• They're Centralized and Not Cell Based - There's a reason guerrilla fighters work in cells, where no one person knows everyone else in the organization. These sites are all centralized. So if they get penetrated, everybody gets rolled up.

Now while you may not be concerned with having your throwaway social networking account banned, you should be concerned that the social networks may trace your activity back to the sites you were promoting and ban those sites. Getting your site banned on all the major social networks could put a serious crimp in your marketing plans. But this could be used in a devastating blackhat attack on a competitor's site!

So let's look at some of the leading sites:

• SUExchange - This is a straight stumble exchange. At the time of this post, they claimed to have 3,891 users, 85,874 votes, and 9,501 sites in their system. That's a big ring! The problem with this site is that the verification method is quite time consuming. First, you vote on a site. Then you use their site to send a message to the owner of that site to verify that you stumbled it. So you could end up stumbling a lot of sites without ever getting credit. Worse yet, the owner of the site has to know who you are and that you voted through the exchange in order to verify you. You're letting a complete stranger know that you're part of the system.
• StumbleUdon - This one is downright scary. You give them your stumbleupon user name and password and they use a bot to perform stumbles on your behalf. I guess the real question here is how many people are foolish enough to do this?
• StumbleXchange - Another straight stumble exchange, this site claimed to have 6,689 members and 126,694 stumbles in their system. Which is odd because they were showing only 2 users online and the website was down for a few hours when I was trying to research it. The way this one works is quite concerning as well. In order to vote, you friend the owner of the site you're voting on, then vote on their submission. After you've done that 10 times you click a button to have StumbleXchange verify that the votes were made. I don't vote on anything, but three of the accounts (the top ones) that it suggested were all marked as "under investigation" by StumbleUpon. And since friending on StumbleUpon now requires that the recipient approve the friend request, this seems like it could be a rather drawn out process. But the worst thing was that rather than take me to the article page, it took me to the Stumble review page for the article. Can you say footprints?
• Social Traffic Exchange - This is a forum for exchanging social votes. It's up to you to verify that the votes were cast, and there's a clear record for anyone that wants to see who is participating in the scheme.
• Piqqus - Appears to still be going strong. This site allows you to exchange Diggs, Stumbles, and Props. It's smart enough to verify the votes on each of those networks itself, and they appear to know what they're doing with the referrer data. Other than the generic problems with these sites in general, Piqqus seems to have its act together.
• 1rstlink - This looks like it has potential, but it only has 50 users and while it covers many other networks than Digg, only the tasks in Digg seem to not be mostly spam. I had an account on this last summer and it never seemed to turn into actual votes even though I was voting the tasks at the time. If it weren't for the generic problems of these sites in general, I'd say this one could be a leader if it could get some momentum. I also can't see how they're making money, so that may explain the lack of momentum.

If you're desperate for traffic, then these sites might fit your needs. There are definate risks involved, but they all have the potential for driving traffic to your site and they're free if you don't count doing the work.

But there has to be a better way to manage working in a social voting group. I wonder what that could be? Subscribe to our RSS feed and you'll be likely to find out!