We're starting to add data from Social Blade on the Top 100/1000 Diggers to our PMS Social Suite. As they say, their data is only an estimate, but it seems to be a widely accepted measure for the Top 100 and Top 1000 Diggers.

The first place you'll see this is on our Add Friends tab in the freemium version. Scroll over to the right and you'll see a new column in the results grid: Rank. If it's n/a, the Digger isn't in the Top 1000. Otherwise, it shows their rank as of this morning. We've set up a job to refresh the stats each day. The next place is in the Manage Friends tab, towards the far right side of the grid as well.

Why Do You Care About the Top Diggers?

Because powerful friends are always a Good Thing. Many Diggers in the Top 100 got there because they have a circle of friends where they vote each other's submissions. If you can become a mutual friend with a Top Digger, you can get in on some of that action as well.

Not all diggs are created equal. The evidence is quite good that Diggs from shouts don't seem to count as much. Diggs from a "new" account don't seem to count as much. Diggs from the top Diggers, on the other hand, seem to carry more weight. Having more top Diggers in your circle of friends can be quite helpful to your efforts.

Interesting Things We Found Out

We've just started playing with this data. Did you know that 29 Diggers out of the current top 1,000 have been banned? Their accounts have been banned, but they're still in the top 1,000 based upon the momentum of their previous records. Some of them you can find with new accounts (and they're also in the top 1,000). Yes Digg, you've missed some people that you've banned who have come back with duplicate accounts.

Did you know that there are Diggers in the Top 100 that have shouts turned off, yet routinely shout their submissions? I'm not going to name names, but a little bit of research with the PMS Social Suite will point them out to you.

Finally, the level of overlap in friends among the Top 100 is astounding. Just do a "Friends of Friend" search on a Top 100 Digger and you'll see them heavily involved with mutual friendships with other Top 100s. Look at their voting activity and it's apparent that there is a very high level of cooperation among many at the top of the heap.

I did a simple experiment this morning and it has already paid off. Have you come across profiles on social websites that have a grocery list of links to other social networks? I've read that this strategy can be useful, but I didn't understand just how useful until today.

Today I updated my LtDraper Digg Profile and added my Twitter, StumbleUpon, Sphinn, Delicious, and AIM accounts in the link section. It certainly can't hurt to send some link juice to those pages, but there are other benefits as well.

I'm a fairly active Digg user. I've had over 2,200 profile views. That's 2,200 opportunities to make contact with someone with similar interests that I've squandered. Well, not really because I've had links back to this site in my Digg profile forever. But today a not insignificant number of people that friended me on Digg also friended me on some of the other sites. You can see it happen because you get three friend notifications in a row from the same person.

The kind of people that I'm trying to meet are active in social media. The chances are pretty good that they'll be participants on other sites as well. There's no reason not to take advantage of the opportunity to expand your footprint on the other networks at the same time.

If someone friends you on one site, it makes sense to friend them back on a different site. From the point of view of each site you're not connected, but you've got a medium to exchange information (and vote requests). Let Digg try to figure out the voting rings that involve exchanging Stumbles for Diggs and Sphinns. As I've said before, tracking down the voting rings is impossible and the social media sites should just ignore it and let the market take care of the spammers.

After a lot of work and even more bug fixes, we released what we're calling Version 1.1 of the PMS Social Suite on Sunday night. Those of you who asked for features will see much of what you asked for. You can go back to the post that suggested you watch our FireBoard RSS Feed and see that we've delivered what was promised, plus a few more extras. Let's go through the new features:

• Cached Search/Research Cleaned Up - The Yes/No box for Research next to the Cached Search field in the Find Friends tab has been eliminated in favor of the more simple Research Button. This should provide a much easier user exerpeince.
• Skip Login Option on Manage Shouts - There's a new checkbox on the Manage Shouts tab for "Skip Login." If you know that you're already logged into Digg, you don't have to wait for the login/logout procedure (and recognizable footprint).
• Shoutback Articles Tracked - You can flag an article that should get a shout back to your friends. When performing shouts, if you digg a friend's shouts that has not dugg this article, it will send them a shout. You can specify the text of the shout with variable substitution, including URL of an article to randomly pick from the list of tracked and shouted articles. If you've got 5 articles in your shoutback queue and your friend has asked you to digg 5 stories, they'll get a shout back for each story in your queue.
• User Configurable Saved Queries - You can now name your queries and click "Save Query" and a new button will appear that loads that query for you.
• Track Whether a Friend Allows Shouts - There's a new field in the grid called "Allows Shouts", as well as a query filter. An interesting query to perform is Mutual=Yes and Allows Shouts=No. Those are people that can shout to you, but you can't shout to them because they've turned it off. Drop them! We've also added a button called "Check Shout Ability" which manually checks whether you can shout to them.
• Track Shouts From and Shouts Ignored - We now keep track of how many shouts we've processed from each friend and how many you've ignored (due to keyword filters or random percentage). If you've got friends that send you a lot of shouts but never digg your stuff, kick them to the curb!
• Friend Tagging - You can add custom "tags" to your friends on the manage friends and tracking screens. For instance, you might tag someone as "Reliable" if they digg a high percentage of your submissions. You can access your tags from the Multi Shout dialog via the GM Script in Digg, thus allowing you to select shout recipients according to how you've marked them. Need something dugg right away -- select everyone tagged as reliable and shout to them first.
• Article Tracking - There's a new tab called "Tracking" where you can keep stories that you're interested in. You can research who is digging these stories and even track buries in real time. Select a group of stories, then calculate which of your friends are digging those stories. You can enter a specific Digg URL, or the grab all the submissions of your user.
• Download to CSV - Premium users now get an option to download any table to CSV.
• Watch Articles for Buries - You can now watch for articles that are being buried in the tracking screen.
• Firefox 3 and Imacros V6.0.6.9 Now Supported - If you're still running FireFox 2, you still need Version 6.0.4.1 of Imacro to be safe, but we've now tested FireFox 3 and the Aug 1 (latest) version of Imacro. Consider that combination a beta. Everything appears to work, but give us your feedback.

Check out the Videos!

We're continuing to pump out videos explaining how these features work. Key videos you'll want to watch are:

• Friending People with Specific Keyword Submits on Digg - How to add a list of friends by just entering a keyword. This replaces the functionality found in the venerable Digg Friend Finder with something much more useful.
• Friending Top Topic Submitters - Want to follow the submitters of a topic on the front page? Add a list of friends based upon a Digg Topic
• Finding Friends Who Digg Stories - How to get the list of friends based on a URL of a Digg Story.
• Automatic Digging of Shouts - Process your incoming shouts the easy way.

And of course, you can browse through all of our videos from the Video menu link at the top of our page. Head on over to YouTube and subscribe so that you'll find out as soon as we release another one (which has been almost daily, lately).

What a Deal!

All of that, and we didn't even increase the price! In fact, we've released the tracking tab as a freemium feature. Consider that a free beta for a lot of new functionality, because at some point in the not too distant future we're going to pull tracking back into the Premium features. But for now you get to try it out for free.

If you check the PMS Social Suite Forum, you'll see that we still have plenty of new features planned. The question we've got for our users is which would you rather see: more features related to Digg, or should we start to implement the feature set we currently have on new social networks? What social networks should we go after next? StumbleUpon? Propeller? Mixx? What would you like to see?

Here's another question. If you're currently a freemium user, what would we have to add to get you to sign up for Premium?

As always, you can comment on this article, post in the forums or just contact us.

I got into twitter in a big way last week. My account had been around for a long time, but I wasn't doing anything to promote it. Then I started using our Twitter Greasemonkey Script and started following 2,000 people that were interested in the same things I was. After a few days I removed everyone that wasn't mutual (down to about 500) and started adding more. I was looking to build a large community of people with similar interests.

I soon found out that Twitter had adjusted my "Follow Limit" to 1,000. I couldn't follow any more than that. So I added another 400 or so friends, and shortly was up to 650 followers. Not bad for less than a week's work.

I've also started to get "organic" followers. People are interested in what I have to say, so they've started following me. So I cut down my list to just mutual friends (people that I follow were also following me) and tried to add some more.

They Gave me the Mark of the Beast!

Today I found that I was unable to add any more people to follow. I'm permanently stuck at following 666 people. They've given me the mark of the devil!

I guess that's how Twitter wants to play. From their blog:

Follow spam is the act of following mass numbers of people, not because you're actually interested in their tweets, but simply to gain attention, get views of your profile (and possibly clicks on URLs therein), or (ideally) to get followed back.

I really disagree with the use of the word "spam" in this context. The key element to spam is that the communication is unsolicited. People constantly degrade this definition by referring to things such as "blog spam" and "bookmark spam". Sorry, those aren't examples of spam. If you visit a blog, you aren't viewing anything that you didn't solicit. If you ask people to submit bookmarks and they do so within the bounds of your terms of service, by definition it's not spam. And there can be absolutely nothing that could constitute "follow spam".

Social Networks are Like a Party

Twitter is a huge party. Everyone with access is invited. You're free to wander around the party and meet people. At a real party, you can wander around and listen in on conversations, and if you find something interesting you join in and add something. It's the same thing at Twitter -- you meet people by looking at their interests, and you join in by following them. If they don't want to talk, then just don't follow them back. They'll eventually go away, just like a real party. If people weren't interested in you, then they wouldn't be clicking on your profile and then to your web page. The fact that following lots of people will bring your site traffic and subscribers is proof that these attempts at communication are NOT spam -- the contact is obviously wanted if people follow it up with a visit to your web site.

Many people who are seeking to get attention in this way have even created programs to do the following on their behalf, which enable them to follow thousands of people at the blink of any eye.

Perhaps Twitter should re-read their TOS, because there's absolutely nothing in it that disallows the use of macros, scripts, bots, etc. In fact, they encourage this by publishing an API. A large factor in their widespread adoption has been the availability of third party tools. Because let's face it, the Twitter HTML interface is pretty clunky and badly needs 3rd party support.

Maybe there is a way to add "thousands of people at the blink of any eye", but the Greasemonkey Script that we provide actually adds friends more slowly than a human can do so by clicking the mouse. Our approach is easier on their architectural limis than their own interface. Either way, everyone is limited to their 100 API actions per hour limit, so what's their problem?

Will the Real Spammers Please Stand Up?

In less-extreme cases, they simply annoy thousands of legitimate users who get an email about this new follower only to find out their interest may not be entirely...sincere.

Uh, isn't it Twitter that's sending out those annoying emails? They're not unsolicited since every user can set their own preference to be notified by email. So what's the big deal? If you think a follower's interest is not "sincere" then just don't follow them back. The fact that so many people do follow you back when you follow them indicates that they're interested in the communication.

And for the people that are concerned about people following you that you aren't interested in, is this any worse than constant updates from some guy wondering whether he should have granola or wheat toast before going to the gym? Nothing says you have to go click on a new followers profile page and then on to their website. It's a lot easier to avoid.

Andy Beal just published this scenario about spamming on Twitter:

If spammer "Viagra4U" followed 10,000 other Twitter users, the chances are that most of those users would have their account set up to alert them of any new followers. Now, Viagra4U's profile includes a spam/trojan link, and his updates likewise do the same. If enough people clicked through to view just who "Viagra4U" was -- and why did he follow them -- some of them might just click on a link. You may be savvy enough to not fall for the above, but plenty of others don't share your mad Twitter skilz.

That approach wouldn't work for the spammer, unless enough people actually were interested enough in the ads to buy something. And if they were interested, then it's not really spam, is it? The twitter user actively went to that site and then make a purchase. More likely, the campaign would end because its not very effective to spend the time adding all those people if they're not going to be interested in what you have to offer.

Back to the Twitter blog:

We do our best by taking a multi-dimensional approach. We look at a number of factors -- including how many people are following you back -- before applying limits. We don't reveal exact limits, because it's somewhat complicated and, more importantly, if you were to tell spammers exactly what the filtering rules are on your email or, say, Google's PageRank, they'd just engineer their way around them much more easily.

Well guys, your approach is broken. Because I've got more followers than I'm allowed to follow. And I'm getting more followers all the time, so obviously there's some interest in what I have to say.

The bad news for some is that it's possible you'll run into a limit and get frustrated. If that happens, please let us know. We want to learn how people want to use Twitter. (Note: We intend to allow you to follow at least as many people as follow you, though there are cases where that might not yet be the case. We will fix that.)

I filled out a support ticket this morning. So far no answer. You'd think they could at least have an auto-responder say "We've received your ticket and are working on your problem." It seems to be a common theme with young, hip Web 2.0 companies that they are completely clueless about customer support. That's probably because since they aren't making any money from us they don't think of us as their customers. Much like TV networks think of viewers as something else than customers. I'd like to think they'll get to it, but there's a comment on their blog showing it's been a long time since they've answered someone else's problem report.

Either way, code that would allow the current situation must be pretty badly broken, which doesn't make me feel very good.

By the way, this is only a small part of our approach to spam in general. We'll be talking more soon about other measures we're taking. Thanks for hanging with us as we figure everything out.

It must be nice to have a big pile of VC cash to sit on while you're figuring things out. From someone that's been there, done that, let me give you this advice. Figure out how to start making money. The VC cash is going to run out, no matter how cool and hip you are. And you're going to find out that making money is a lot harder than getting the system up and running was.

I'll give the CEO of Twitter another hint: The people that you'll end up making money from are the business users. If you start charging for access, the users that want to post about their breakfast choices are going to go away really fast. They won't pay, they won't even put up with advertising. If you think your users are disturbed by a few extra follows, just wait until you start trying to monetize your site. The people that are using the service to further their business are the ones that will be able to make a financial justification to feed into your business model, whatever that ends up being.

One of the rules of being a VC funded entreprenuer is that you won't realize the value of these nuggets you get from people until several years later. Enjoy your ride.

The Good News

The good news in all of this is that I was able to use our Greasemonkey Twitter Script to reach a critical mass on Twitter. There are now enough people following me that I can actually have conversations that I'm interested in. And people continue to add me (I can tell, because I keep getting those annoying emails every 10 minutes). I'm hoping that Twitter can figure out that I'm not some evil spammer and just want to participate in a wider community and remove these silly limits.

You should seriously consider effectively communicating with the people that follow you on Twitter.

There's a twitter account called RU4real that claims to be an experiment. Here's the only thing they've tweeted:

DO NOT FOLLOW THIS ACCOUNT. It is an experiment to see how many people read the pages of the people they follow. You are a tool.

The problem is that this experiment isn't proving anything other than that people out there are using things like TweetLater, an excellent utility that allows you to automatically follow anyone that follows you. You can send a nice little direct message to your new follower as well.

Most people seem to auto-respond with something along the lines of "Hi! Thanks for the follow. Look forward to seeing your tweets!" While that's certainly cordial of them, I think they're missing out on a great opportunity. Someone has contacted you with a follow, and you'll get their attention for 140 characters. Why not use an automated message along the lines of:

Thanks for the follow. Please consider http://feeds.feedburner.com/PromoteMySite for your reader, you'll enjoy it.

We've been using our Greasemonkey Twitter Script and over the last week Oliver and I have picked up about 800 new followers. Getting into even a small percentage of those follower's daily read can have long term benefits for your site. (Watch the twitter video on the Promote-My-Site YouTube channel)

The same tactic will work on other social networks as well. One of the nice features of our PMS Social Suite is that you can select everybody that recently became one of your fans and send them a shout. It's the "Welcome to being my fan" shout. Ask them to vote your favorites, point them at your blog, whatever. Just be sure to take advantage of taking part of the conversations that you're trying so hard to start.

Perhaps some of the people that are following ru4Real got there because they've been following a random strategy of following anybody and everybody. If they'd been using our Greasemonkey script, they would have unfriended ru4Real because they didn't become mutual. Their reward for the bad strategy of not using our script is to be "A Tool".

Social Sites like Digg are like being in high school all over again.

You really have to keep that in mind when you're coming up with a strategy of how to promote your content on these networks. If you're just starting out, you're sitting with the geeks in the cafeteria, and the cool people aren't going to pay much attention to you. It will take a long time (at least in internet time) to carefully craft a reputation that will allow you to move in the popular (read that profitable) social circles.

There are lots of reasons to build up your friend networks. The primary one is that having a large network of friends will allow you to communicate to them and rally support for your submissions. You can put out the best content in the world, but if you're depending upon people to spot it as it scrolls off the upcoming page at 5 positions per second you're not going to get anywhere. Great content is just gas in the tank. You have to support that content with great promotion.

If you don't agree with the above statement, try finding a top digger that doesn't have a large netork of friends. Being at the top of a social network will bring you friends, but you can't get there without a critical mass of people to support your submissions.

Remember Google's murmurs about an impending slap this Fall for social network submissions that were purely self serving? If you're submitting your own blog to social networks just for the links and not getting much play from the community, you're going to be in trouble. Having a lot of friends is a defensive move against that impending slap -- being popular shows that your content is worthwhile and deserves authority. Again, great content without the votes to back it up won't be worth much.

Finally, even if you're submitting to social networks just for the links, think about the internal structures of these sites. If you've got 500 friends, that's 500 internal links to your profile page. And your profile page points to your articles. Sure, it may not be a lot of juice, but it'sa heck of a lot better than a profile page without any incoming links.

Time to Party

Joining in on the conversation on these sites is like going to a party. The only difference is that anyone with an internet connection can get an invitation to the party. If you're an internet marketer, the purpose of going to the party is to build up worthwhile relationships. It doesn't do you any good to spend time with people that can't or won't do anything for you. If you're just at the party to have fun and drink a few beers then you can just wander around aimlessly. But if you're attending the party to further your business, you need to have a strategy.

As you walk into the room, you'll see lots of different groups of people interacting. Let's take a look at some of those groups and how you might try to fit in.

The Kings and Queens Holding Court

Some groups consist of an individual surrounded by a lot of people listening to what they have to say. The communication is completely uni-directional. The King/Queen is doing all of the talking, and there is a large group of people listening to every word.

As Mel Brooks said, "It's good to be the King." And while the temptation to friend MrBabyMan and become one of his 10,111 fans (as of the minute that I'm writing this) can be quite strong, the fact is that he's only got 328 friends and you therefore have roughly a 3.2% chance of becoming a friend. Less than that because he's already got enough friends, and they're mostly other top diggers.

If you've come to the party to build up worthwhile relationships, there's not much the Kings and Queens are going to do for you. Perhaps someday when you've become royalty they'll deign to be your friend, but until then it's not a good use of your time.

The Wall Flowers

These are the people that are just hanging around and watching. They're not participating in any conversations -- their comment count is pretty close to zero. They may vote on things, but they don't have much of a friend network. They aren't very active either. Take a look at the date of their last submissions -- it's usually months ago. Spending your time approaching them is another waste.

Loudmouth Cheaters

These are people that have lots of friends and lots of fans. Check their profile and they've most likely added a bunch of friends lately. Their strategy is to churn and dump. They friend a lot of people, and when they get a mutual friendship back they vote for their friends submissions for a few weeks, then they drop the friend and turn them into a fan. Digg is especially bad about this because there's no notification that someone has dropped you. BTW, these people are often the ones sending 30 shouts every day, sometimes several duplicates at a time.

Avoid getting stuck in these groups by using a few guidelines. Don't friend someone back with a high number of both friends and fans with a recent history of adding a lot of friends. And never, ever friend someone back that has shouts turned off. There's nothing worse than the loudmouth that sends you 20 shouts a day and has the audacity to refuse to listen to shouts from their friends.

The Torch and Pitchfork Crowd

Most social networks have a few groups that have appointed themselves the network police. They ruthlessly seek out content that goes against their idea of what is good for the network and attack it. On Digg it's the Digg Mafia or Bury Brigade. Needless to say, there's nothing to be gained in getting involved with people like that. They aren't there for a mutual relationship, they're desparately trying to prop up their low self image.

You can spot these types of people from their comments. Try a site search in google for the name of the person and the word "spam." If they throw that term around a lot then they're probably a self appointed netcop and you'll want to avoid them.

Lively Small Groups

You can usually find a few small groups of people having lively discussions. They're active on the site, making lots of submissions and voting for each other's posts. They tend to have fairly large mutual friend counts. There's an implicit understanding that they'll vote for your submissions if you vote for theirs.

These can be great groups to find, but you have to be careful that you don't get dragged into a voting block. Social networks are on the lookout for this -- Digg discounts votes from people that vote as a block. So don't ever vote 100% for someone, and don't vote up questionable content. There's nothing easier for an admin to spot than a spam article with 20 votes. And when those same 20 people have all voted on several questionable submissions it's easy to mark them as a block.

OTOH, even a block can be useful. It's probably easier to get 500 votes from a voting block than 50 completely random votes. And the rumour is that Digg would count those the same. It's better if you don't get dragged into a block, but don't let it keep you up at night.

Secret Friends

These are groups of people that you can't spot other than to look at their voting behavior. They don't friend each other on the network, but they do communicate and vote each other's submissions up. It can be an innocuous as people that automatically vote for the posts of certain personalities on Sphinn, or as nefarious as someone with a huge rolodex of AIM addresses that works their list to drum up votes.

These can be great relationships to enter into, but it takes careful nurturing. You've become more than "network friends" -- you're becoming an actual friend.

Another way to approach these relationships is to tell a network friend "I'm going to drop you as a friend on the social network, but don't worry, I'll keep looking at your submissions while you're doing the same for me." My guess is that the social networks aren't really looking at the friend lists, but rather the voting blocks, so this approach can add a lot of paperwork without much benefit.

Robots

Yes Virginia, there are robots on social networks.

Here's hint for spotting robots: their profile picture is almost always an attractive young woman. Guess what? The actual number of "hot babes" cruising Digg pushing articles about video cards is pretty small.

You can also spot them through their voting patterns. Just find "people" that almost always vote for each others posts. The auto shoutback feature of the PMS Social Suite sort of works like that, except that you can include a lot of variables as to how you're going to operate and you can be picky about which shouts you'll listen to. But there are plenty of robots out there that you can establish a friendship with and reliably get your shouts Dugg if you use them correctly.

Tools for Figuring Out the Party

Spotting these groups at the party can be a pretty daunting task. You really don't have any choice other than to use an automated research tool such as the PMS Social Suite. Paging through the interface of a social network trying to spot these patterns is pretty hit an miss. If you're just a hobbyist, then you've got the time to burn. But if you're purporting to be a social network marketing professional, you need to use some real tools.

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?

We've been busy beavers here at Promote My Site! Between taking in all the feedback from the beta as well as fixing some post release reported bugs and dealing with changes in the Digg pages, we've had a lot to do. We've also put out two very useful Greasemonkey scripts that you can read about in the last few days posts.

New Features in Manage Shouts

Manage Shouts is a premium feature of the PMS Social Suite. If you haven't already signed up, this feature is easily worth the price of admission if you're serious about maintaining your Digg presence.

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

Here's a summary of the fields:

• Digg User - remains the same. This is the user that you'll be performing your shouts for.
• Examine Each Story - remains the same. Whether to stop on each story or just blast through everything
Delete Shouts Afterwards? - remains the same. Deletes each shout after you're done with it.
• Random Percent to Digg - New Feature. This helps prevent your shouts looking like a voting group by randomly digging shouts that you receive rather than just digging everything. Leave it at the default of 100 to Digg everything that it shouted to you, or 0 and set Delete Shouts Afterwards to Yes to just clear out your queue.
• Minimum/Maximum Wait - remains the same. A randomly geneated range of time (in seconds) to wait between each operation to make the script appear a bit more, ahem, human.
• Ignore Shouts with These Keywords - New Feature. Enter a comma delimited list of keyword phrases that you'd like to ignore. If the phrase appears in the title of the shout, it won't get a vote. If you have Delete Shouts Afterwards set to Yes, you'll just delete them.

There are lots of opportunities for optimizing your Digg experience with these new features. Don't want to see any stories about the Buffalo Sabres? Just put "Sabres, Buffalo" into the Ignore Shouts with These Keywwords field, set Random Percent to Digg to 0, Examine Each Story to No, and Delete Shouts Afterwards to Yes and you'll quickly clean your queue of these stories.

Most of our features come from user feedback, so if you've got any more ideas, please drop us a line.

You're going to want to install the PMS Digg Shouts Greasemonkey Script right away.

As we've said many times before, if you want to be effective on Digg, you need a large friend network. But more importantly, your friends need to be the type of friends that will be receptive to your shouts and Digg your articles if they like them. And the best way to have good friends is to be a good friend.

That means that you need to actively evaluate and Digg your incoming shouts. People notice when you Digg their submissions. There's nothing more attractive than someone else that finds you attractive.

Penny Pinching with your Diggs

The way some people act, you'd think Digg charges by the vote. They're very stingy about what stories they'll vote for. I'd like to think that's an altruistic "betterment of the community" approach, but in reality they're still just voting for yet another Bush bashing article or lolcats picture. The real reason people pinch pennies with their Diggs is that Digging stories takes time, and time and attention is the ultimate currency in Web 2.0

The only way to increase your "Digg Revenue" is to spend more time doing it, or create more time by being more efficient. Frankly, I'll always go with being more efficient.

Print Your Own Money

So let's print some money! We've already published the painfully simple Greasemonkey Script to Quickly Delete Your Shouts on Digg. Now here's something that really saves time.

Each time you'd like to vote for a friend's shout, you need to click the header to their story. Then wait for the page to load, which provides no more information than what you had before. The you get to click the url that leads to the actual story. Sure, Digg gets the benefit of another page refresh, but you get to spend your precious time waiting for their server.

The PMS Digg Shouts Greasemonkey Script solves that. This is what your incoming shouts screen will look like after you install the Greasemonkey script:

The script replaces the URL that would normally just point to the Digg summary page to the the story with the actual story url. Plus, it adds a "Digg" link to each story. Just click that link to Digg the story.

Your incoming shouts page takes the form htpp://digg.com/users/yourname/friends/shoutsin. Or you can get to it via Profile->Friends Activity and then clicking the "Shouts Received by [your name]" in the right column.

If you're a premium user of our PMS Social Suite you'll need to install this script in order to use the Auto shout feature. The suite now relies upon this script since it dramatically speeds up how fast you can process shouts. But if you're not a premium user (you should be!), you can still use it to dramatically improve your processing of your friends shouts. Combined with the "Delete Your Shouts on Digg" script, you can be about as efficient on a manual basis as possible.

Sometimes you just slap your head because a very hard problem has such a simple answer.

If you use Digg, you're well aware how painful it is to delete your incoming shouts if you have a large number of friends. And of course, if you're serious about promoting anything on Digg, you'll have a lot of friends. After a week of vacation over the 4th of July, I recently came back to 50 pages of incoming shouts. That's a lot of clicking on the delete button and the "Are You Sure you want to delete this shout?" dialog that Digg so graciously offers.

PMS Social Suite Clears out your Digg Shouts Easy as Pie

If you're a user of our PMS Social Suite you're already aware of how easy it is to clear out your shout queue. Just use the "Manage Shouts" tab to dispose of everything. Click a button, go out for coffee, and when you come back you've cleared out everything in your queue and Dugg everything your friends have sent you.

Except that something broke last week. Digg evidently made a change that invalidates the Imacro "ONDIALOG" command, so the script was getting the "Are you sure?" dialog and waiting for the user to click Ok to delete each shout. Not much fun. Debugging from the Imacro side seems to be impossible. I even tried tricking Digg into thinking that our Imacro script had just sent the Ajax code to delete the shout. Nothing seemed to work.

Forehead Slap

The answer is really easy. All we really needed was a Greasemonkey script that would tell Digg that the confirm button had already been clicked. The script is only 1 line long. It's a little tricky because we have to tell Greasemonkey to run the script in the context of the page and not the browser since if we run it in the browser context we can't overload the "confirm" function the way we want to.

If you don't have Greasemonkey installed, drop everything and go install it right now. Have you been living under a rock or something?

So here's a gift to the Digg Community: The PMS Digg Confirm Ignore Script. Just click the link and Greasemonkey will install the script for you. If you're a PMS Social Suite User, your "Manage Shouts" scripts will now fly through all 50 pages of your backlog. And if you're not using our tool, you can avoid having to click twice for every shout that you want to delete.