Before Digg went on its banning rampage, they had a little bug. If you had friended someone that had their account banned, you'd get an error when you clicked on the "remove friend" button in their interface. If one of your friends were banned, you couldn't remove them.

That wasn't such a big deal when bannings were few and far between, but with the recent spate of bannings Digg had created a bit of a problem. There is a hard limit of 1,000 friends for a user on Digg. So if 100 of your friends had been banned, you were effectively left with only 900 slots.

A few days ago I noticed that Digg had finally fixed that problem. I don't know when it happened, but at some point they implemented a kludge that allows you to delete friends that have been banned.

The Good News

As the saying goes, I told you all that so I could tell you this. By fixing that bug, they've introduced a new bug which most power users will find is a real feature. If you were a banned power user, one of the most stinging aspects of the ban is the loss of all your friend data. You'd spent months building up a nice friend network, and now all that data was gone. But is it?

Try this page: Oliver Taco's Profile. Yep, it's the oops page as expected. Now try the same page but via the Digg API. Again, as expected you get a "No such user" error return. Now, try this: Oliver Taco's Friend List.

The data is still in the database. They couldn't delete the linkages because that would obviously break something else that allows the banned users to be removed as friends. So the upshot it that even if your account is banned, you can recover your friend list. Just replace the user name and change the value of "offset" to 100, 200, 300, etc and you'll get pages of data 100 records at a time. If you want a list of your fans, just change the "friends" to "fans". BTW, that's an XML file that you can download into Excel if you want to see a pretty spreasheet.

Of course, if you were using a tool like the PMS Social Suite none of that would be a concern because you'd be concentrating on building real relationships outside of social networks and wouldn't be a victim of the whims of Digg.

We've talked about finding profiles on Digg that have Toolbar PageRank to pass. It's one of the criteria for finding an Interesting Digger. But how many Digg profiles are out there that have positive Toolbar Page Rank?

The answer is quite a few, even after you get past the Top 1000 Diggers:

This is based on an analysis of around 100K Digg profiles. Here are some key take aways from this analysis:

• 4.3% of Digg Profiles Have Rank - That's a pretty significant number when you factor in how very few users are really active. It's been my experience that with a few months of active digging and attracting strong profiles to make you a mutual friend you can build a profile with positive link juice. Guess what? You can add links in your profile directly to the URL of your choice, and they're do follow. Consider that a bonus in additional to everything else you get from Digg.
• You Don't Have to be in the Top to Get Value - The Top 1000 are only about 25% of the profiles with positive link juice to spend. There are a lot of strong profiles that never get a submission to go popular. You can fly under the radar on Digg and still get a lot of benefit.
• Having Positive Page Rank Will Get You More Friends - It's a self feeding cycle. As your profile becomes more powerful, more people want to be your friend, making your profile even more powerful.

What level of activity does it take to get a Digg profile with positive page rank? Check out these stats:

As you can see, the average amount of activity for a user with positive pagerank is pretty low. 4,298 Diggs is only 200 Diggs per day for 21 days. 10 comments/day for 31 days will get you into the average number of comments. 5 submissions a day during that first month will get you into the average number of submissions. The numbers of friends, mutuals, and fans is not that high. That's not to say that if you do just those things you'll get a Digg profile with positive pagerank -- you still have to garner the appropriate internal links on the site into your profile. In other words, you've got to get the right friends in order to build up the profile. But it clearly does not take an extraordinary amount of activity to make it happen.

It's even more interesting to look at the numbers it takes to reach the various levels of pagerank. There is actually a trail off in the amount of activity between 6 and 5, except for the number of fans. Which makes sense -- fans are a one way link into your profile, so having more of them will bring more internal juice.

Take a close look at the PR 1 column. It really does not take a lot of activity or numbers of friends/mutuals/fans in order to get to that first level. You could easily build a user with those characteristics within a month.

Remember when we suggested that you Cross Pollinate Your Social Media Profiles? This makes even more sense in light of these statistics. A few inbound links from other social networks can dramatically improve your link juice. If you look at some of the PR 6 profiles, they've got incoming links from blogs because people talk about them. Supporting your social media profiles with incoming link juice from your other web assets can be very helpful. As your profile becomes more "high profile," you'll add friends and juice.

Now, if only there was a way to buy a book and some software that would show you exactly how to build a powerful Digg profile and make the process easy. Oh wait, there is a book on how to Dominate Digg! And it includes free software!

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!

Being a prolific commenter is a key to social media success on any network, but especially on Digg. Aside from being able to expose your great prose to all humanity, there are many excellent reasons you should leave comments on as many stories as you can:

• Get Seen - Leaving comments gets your name out there. People start to recognize you. If they recognize you, they're more likely to Digg your submissions. It's human nature -- we tend to like to deal with people we already know.
• Get Friends - In addition to being seen, there are a certain number of people that will add you to their friends list if they appreciate your comments.
• Be a Participant - A high comment count will help to deflect charges that you're just a social media marketer and not giving to the community.

The Right Ways and Places to Comment

Make sure that your comments are relevant, insightful, and not likely to anger anyone. "Great Story" is not a comment and is likely to help you pick up a bury posse. Don't comment unless you know what you're talking about. It's just like going to a party -- don't be a blowhard, and don't be the guy handing out business cards to everyone he meets.

Leaving comments on any old post won't do. It doesn't do you any good if your comments aren't seen. The key is to be one of the first commenters on a story that makes it to the front page. Most people have left their settings to view comments in the default behavior, which is to order comments by oldest first. If you're one of the first to comment, your picture shows up right above the fold for the story which will be seen by thousands.

The best way to do that is to look for stories that:

• Are Submitted by a Top Digger - These are the people with the best chance of getting a story to the front page.
• Don't have more than just a few comments - And preferably don't have any comments. But if you can be one of the first three to comment, you're in good shape.
• Are on a story with enough votes - You want the stories you're commenting on to have enough votes already that they're likely to hit front page.
• Are on Diggable Content - After you've gotten some experience, you'll be able to easily spot stories that will make it to the front page. Concentrate on those stories.

Making it Easy

You could, of course, go wading through the Digg Top 100 list and check for submissions that don't have any comments yet. That's a lot of mouse clicks, and by the time you find a story it's likely that you won't be there in time to comment. Or you could use the Dashboard on the PMS Social Suite, which provides you with nice list of clickable links to stories that meet all these criteria. Watch this video for a quick tour of how easy it is to do this:

Just Do it Every Day

Just make a point of adding five good comments every day. Make it part of your daily routine. In time, you'll be a popular member that no one suspects of being out to dominate Digg!

You can now have a few quick peeks at the new capabilities of our PMS Social Suite! We've put up a few videos on YouTube that walk you through some of the really interesting points. For starters, here is a quick overview of the dashboard:

Hot Articles to Submit

There are a lot of reasons that you want to submit excellent content to social networks, other than just being a good unpaid worker for these sites:

• Build a Following - Submitting articles that are likely to hit the front page will bring you exposure to the community, resulting in more people seeking you out as a friend. It's a lot easier to have people find you than to find other people.
• Get Your Percentage Up - Having a higher "Made Popular" percentage will bring you more credibility, helping you even further in building your friends list on Digg.
• Hide Your Real Submissions - Yes, you're doing this because you want 1 out of 20 of your submissions to be for URLs that will actually make you some money. If you only submit your own stuff, you'll get labeled a spammer. But if only 5% of your submissions have this hidden motive, you'll fly right under the radar. Don't take this as advice to submit your own material. What you should really be doing is building up a large enough offline friend base that you can get other people to (seemingly) randomly submit your material. And, of course, you'll want to be able to submit things for your friends without appearing to only submit items with a financial motive.

We've made this much easier than it is to do by hand. We constantly track over 200 rss feeds with a history of making it to the front page of Digg. We present you with a list of articles randomly selected from these sources and verified to have not already been submitted to Digg. Just click the link and you'll go to the article page. If you've got the Digg This Firefox Plugin installed, just select the text from the article that you want to be in the summary and right click the menu item to Digg the article. Viola, you've made a submission that's has a chance to make it popular!

Interesting Diggers

One of the more useful features of the new dashboard is the Interesting Diggers section. We've got a crack team constantly delving through our data to find Diggers that would make good friends, but aren't necessarily the first people you would look at. In fact, you probably wouldn't find the few hundred interesting Diggers out there out of the hundred thousand or so active Diggers. What makes an Interesting Digger? We talked about them in our article on Stalking Small Game on Digg. Here's the sofware in action:

If you noticed that Digg posted a blog article announcing the retirement of Digg Spy, then you read this:

"One issue I suspect may be brought up is that Digg Spy is one place on the site that surfaces some burying activity. People have tried using Digg Spy to track burying activity and I won't be surprised if conspiracy theorists accuse us of burying (pun intended) the feature to hide this. In fact, only a very small subset of buries on the site actually appeared on Digg Spy due to the small window of activity that was actually visible through the feature and any "patterns" that people perceived by watching the buries have always been grossly inaccurate."

The fact that Daniel Burka felt the need to include that paragraph shows that he knew exactly how wrongheaded their thinking was.

Let me translate for you: Digg, which prides itself on being democratic and transparent, has decided to go from murky to completely dark. If Digg were really acting transparently, buries would be visible. You'd be able to see both "Who Dugg This?" and "Who Buried This?" in their interface. In the short term, it would be very easy for them to just add a /buries endpoint in their API. Their reasoning of "you could only see a few buries" just doesn't cut it. Now we're going from a just a little bit of visibility into absolutely nothing. For a company that thinks of itself as a Web 2.0 leader, they really don't get it.

It's Going to Break Some Software Out There

I suppose it doesn't bother Digg that they're going to invalidate the work of outside developers. Poisoning the ecosystem is never a good way to build a following. You wouldn't see Google do something like that. Perhaps culture clash was one of the reasons the acquisition deal didn't go through.

It will be interesting to see if the Digg Alerter still works after Diggspy is taken down. Hopefully it won't just lock up when it can't connect to the Diggspy to monitor buries. Long time users of the PMS Social Suite will notice that we had to remove bury monitoring from our tracking screens. There's just no way to know now.

A Toxic Environment

Digg has created a toxic environment by being secretive about buries. Digg's biggest problem isn't the script users, it's the Bury Brigade. Roving bands of high school children are terrorizing fine upstanding citizens on Digg by burying stories they disagree with. Having perfectly good stories get knocked out of consideration for the front page has probably done more to turn off potential power users than any other aspect of Digg. If Digg wants to grow its user base, they're going to have to make the environment more inviting. And that means getting a leash on some of their undesirables.

The flip side to this argument if that if Digg were transparent about buries then we'd all have more insight into the algorithm and thus they'd be a victim of more gaming. But this just doesn't cut it. Even if you have perfect numbers, you can't completely reverse engineer the underlying algorithm. There are just too many variables. Google's data is completely available for anyone -- you can go look at all the pages in their results and do your own analysis. Yet outside of Google, nobody knows what the real algorithm is despite literally hundreds of thousands of very bright people trying to figure it out. And they're free to tweak their algorithm every day if they wish. Reddit's algorithm is open source and it doesn't hurt them.

It has also been claimed that if buries were public there would be more disagreements among users. I guess that's because Digg believes that secrecy breeds trust. Of course, the real problem is that when people are able to hide behind complete anonominity and not take responsibility for their actions they're willing to do horrible things to each other. If Digg wants to make the bury brigade behave, then just make bury information available. The backstabbing would go away. How many people automatically assume that someone who made a less than positive comment about their submission buried it? If the information were open everyone would be a lot better behaved.

The underlying problem is that Digg gives buries way too much weight. Of course there's no way to know, but everyone I've ever talked to has the impression there is not a one-to-one value differential between diggs and buries. Digg could of course clear this up by making the data public, but it seems they think we should just trust them.

Fix the Spam Bans

You only have to look at the number of quality sites that have been banned from Digg as spam to see the problem. Digg's complete lack of any review or appeal process for banned sites is pathetic. Say what you will about Promote My Site, it's not a spam site. If it is, I'd like to know where our checks are from our advertisers! While many in the Digg Community may not agree with what we have to say here, we're not spammers. Most of the children on Digg don't understand that just because you don't like something doesn't make it spam. If the spam report data was public, then most of these issues would be cleared up. People would only be willing to mark the truly spammy sites as spam.

An easy fix for the spam problem would be to make the spam data completely open. When a site gets marked as spam, it would get a flag on articles that says "Users have reported this site as spam." Diggers could then go to a separate page and vote and comment on whether they really think the site is spam. That way you wouldn't have sites whose articles received several hundred diggs get marked as spam by a few brats and have quality content removed from the system.

Don't Sweat the Buries

Getting the to front page is great work if you can get it, but it shouldn't be the reason you're working with Digg if you're trying to promote commercial content. A front page on Digg can bring a ton of traffic, but it won't monetize very well. Diggers don't click ads and since living in your Mom's basement doesn't provide a lot of disposable income they don't tend to buy very much. Even if you're making money from ad impressions, it still probably isn't worth the time and effort it takes to get a front page.

Let's make a baseball analogy. It's much better to be a .500 hitter than racks up singles, doubles, and triples rather than a .050 hitter that hits home runs. The home runs just aren't enough to make up for all the strike outs, even if you're a home run leader.

If you can consistently get a story to 100 Diggs, then you can build a lot of search engine love. If your friend list that will consistently vote your stories are mostly PR 3/4 profiles, you've got a powerful SEO machine. The long term benefit from being able to dominate a keyword niche on Google will far outlast the flood of traffic from a Digg front page. The traffic you get from the search engines is far more valuable -- those are people that are looking for what you have and are ready to buy.

It's not a flashy strategy. It won't make you famous. But it will make you money. The last time I checked, not many stores accepted fame as payment.

A while back we wrote about Stalking Big Game on Digg. We pointed out that the PMS Social Suite had an easy way to load the Top 100 and Top 1000 Diggers. Friending them consists of just selecting them in the Find Friends grid and clicking Go To Page. The application will automatically open a tab with each user's profile for you. Just click on the tab and click Add Friend and you're their friend.

That's one way to approach things, and it should certainly be part of your strategy. If you're working in a marketing group, at least one of you should have as a task drawing the Top 100 as your friends. But it's tough work. Think of how many friend requests someone in the Top 100 gets everyday. Getting the attention of a Top 100 Digger is a tall order.

Smaller is Easier

Stalking smaller game is quite a bit easier, but they're tougher to spot. You can't just drop by SocialBlade and download the list. But the benefits of active diggers that aren't in the top 1000 are significant:

• You Can Get Their Attention - You're looking for other diggers that are also playing the game. They're actively looking for friends to support and get support in return. If you friend them and start digging their submissions, most of the time they'll respond with making the relationship mutual in short order.
• They Work Harder - Remember the old Avis commercials? Someone who is trying to build an account will be more diligent in helping you than a Top 100 Digger, who may have the attitude that you need them more than they need you.
• Early Relationships Are Stronger - Given the turmoil on Digg, the people that are at the top today most likely will not be at the top next year. Becoming an early friend of the up-and-coming stars could pay very handsomely.

So What Are We Looking For?

Spotting a future star can be fairly difficult. If you're doing it manually, you'll be spending a lot of time pouring through profile pages trying to get a feel for how hard people are working to join the club of Top Diggers. Here are some characteristics of people that will make great friends:

• They Blind Digg - While blind digging may be hated by the community, the simple fact is that most of the Top 1000 Diggers blind digg. We define a blind digger as someone that will digg your stories without spending too much time looking at them. As MrBabyMan said in his podcast, he supports his friends by digging their submissions and he trusts that they're submitting great content because he has carefully vetted them. Set aside the logic of that statement and consider that someone that is blind digging makes a good target to become one of your friends. How do you find a blind digger? One way to look for them is to look at the number of diggs they're doing in a day. Someone that diggs 500 stories a day most likely is not carefully reading and considering every story. You can also look at the times of someone's diggs. If they digg a burst of 3-4 stories a minute they're probably not reading them.
• They Mostly Digg Their Friends Submissions - The metric you're looking for is what percentage of their friends submissions do they vote for? It's not a measure of how many of their diggs are for their friends, because most likely they'll also vote a lot of random stories that hit the front page. But if you can spot a trend that someone is digging most of the stories that are submitted by their friends, then you can reasonably conclude that they're also playing the game.
• They Have Link Juice in Their Profile - Yes, Google Toolbar Pagerank is mostly useless as a measure, but one thing it can be good for is spotting a page that Google thinks is important. If a Digg profile is greater than PR 0, then you've spotted someone that's doing something right. Having them vote for your stories is a good thing -- it flows link juice to your submission and thus to the final resting place in your url.
• Their Profile Was Recently Created - I've seen a lot of advice from experts that claims you should only friend someone that has been around for a long time. Actually, the converse can be true. If you spot a profile that is only a few months old and is actively playing the game then you may be on to a winner. It could very well be someone very famous that was banned, knows exactly how to play the game, and is on their way back up.
• They are Active - If they're not churning around 100 Diggs/Day for the last 30 days then they're probably not worth your time. The people that are going at it really hard and recently are who you're looking for.
• They've Posted Contact Information - If their profile doesn't have an image and there's no way to contact them off site such as AIM or an email, then they don't really know how to play the game. If you can AIM them, then you can contact them and build a relationship without Big Brother Kevin watching what you're doing. Furthermore, someone that puts their AIM in their Digg profile understands the game. Most people's reaction is to not put up an address that could be spammed. But people that are really working at Digg understand that you need people to be able to contact you offsite.
• They Don't Shout - If they don't have shouts turned off from public view then they're not a player. If they're shouting 10 stories a day then they haven't figured out that shouts actually hurt your submissions. A public shout list with a ton of shouts is a good indicator that they're not what you're looking for.

If you're trying to do all that manually, then good luck. You can spend a lot of time analyzing a profile to determine blind digging rates and friend support. Or you can use the PMS Social Suite, which puts all of those statistics right at your fingertips. We even provide a customized list of Interesting Diggers on your dashboard that show potential friends that meet the criteria for they kind of friends you should be looking for.

It's really just a matter of how much your time is worth. If the tool saves you 2 hours/day for 20 days a month, then your time has to be worth less than $1/hour for it to make sense for you to work without a tool. Go buy Wickedly Evil Social Marketing Tactics and you'll get 3 months worth of the software for free. The book costs less than a quarterly subscription. How can you lose?

No, our site hasn't been hacked.

If you're an existing customer of the PMS Social Suite, you've noticed some huge changes. Yes, we got the latest version out yesterday. It's chock full of new features. But we don't want you to buy it from us.

Death to Robots!

What's more important is what this version is missing. We took all the robots out back and shot them.

Really. All the robots and scripts have been removed. As we've said in the past, there's nothing morally wrong with using scripts, but since Digg is on a Banning Rampage, it just made sense to get rid of them. From now on, everything you do in the tool will be completely natural. And naturally, we've made it much easier to do the things you need to do. We don't actually click on anything for you any more, but we do take you to exactly where you need to go to get done what you need to get done.

I find myself using this version of the software more than I did the previous ones. And there's nothing in there that Digg could complain about. Everything is completely natural. Heck, users of this tool will actually increase their organic use of Digg, so Digg will see more real page views. They ought to like that!

Prices Slashed!

You'll also notice that the prices have changed on the product. Instead of the grocery list of options and combinations of time periods and numbers of users, we've greatly simplified your choices. All subscriptions are for unlimited users at a single location. So if you've got 10 people in your office, you can all use the same subscription and manage your social media activities in an integrated fashion. We're only offering monthly and quarterly time periods for the licenses, so the checkout cart isn't nearly as intimidating as it used to be.

An unlimited user license for one month is now only $39.95. That's a huge discount from the old price of $149.95 for only five users. An unlimited quarterly license is now only $99.95. That's not much to pay for something that can make your entire team more effective and save them a few hours a day.

Something Wicked This Way Comes

But wait, there's more! We've put together an incredible deal with social media guru Chris Lang, the author of "Wickedly Evil Social Marketing Tactics." His book sells for $97, but included with his book is a 3 month subscription for unlimited users for the PMS Social Suite. For a very limited time, for less than the $99.95 you'd pay for a quarterly subscription or the $119.85 you'd pay by the month, you get the software, his book, and a huge pile of extras worth over $546. If you're an existing PMS Social Suite User, don't extend your subscription next month. Just go grab this offer right now (remember, it's limited and there are only so many we can let him give out at this price) and use the coupon to extend your current subscription. Head on over to "Wickedly Evil Social Marketing Tactics" right now. What are you waiting for?

I'll admit I'm not a great fan of the "internet gurus" that purport to tell you how to make millions on your computer from home. A lot of those guys are just trying to make a buck by being famous. Most of those books are full of fluff that you can easily pick up for free just by reading blogs about internet marketing. And the techniques don't work, because anybody who is anybody already knows about them. What struck me about Chris and his ideas was how often we had come to the same conclusions. There are some really deep concepts in there. As I read his book I found myself in agreement with everything he said. There are some very powerful techniques in there that you won't find anywhere else. Just learning the secret of how to build a PR 3/4 Digg Profile in 30-60 days is worth the price of the book alone. You could spend thousands of hours trying to figure out the techniques in this book and not be successful. It's really just a question of how much your time is worth.

Great Features

The new version has lots of great features, most of which we've already talked about in previous posts. We'll have some new videos up soon and will have a series of articles talking about the strategies for using the tool. A lot of what went into this new release was to align the software with the tactics that Chris writes about in his book. His book teaches you how to use social media effectively. Our software makes it easy.

You can take the software for a test drive by signing up as a registered user and taking advantage of the "Freemium" version. Sure, it's missing most of the really cool stuff, but it's pretty useful as is. If you're already a registered user, head over to the new PMS Social Suite and see the new dashboard and think about how it can make your life easier. And then think about the things you could do if you were paying for the software!

Digg has been on a banning rampage lately. The most famous digger to get banned has been Zaibatsu. The first glimpse of what Digg was up to came when Brian Cuban was banned. By the count in our database this morning, there have been about 600 users banned in the last week or so. That figure could be a little off -- we may not have researched someone for a few months -- but it shows the magnitude of what Digg is up to.

They also rolled up ltdraper, donatpms, and olivertaco. According to the email we received from Digg, donatpms was banned not because that user did anything (we haven't run anything through that), but because it was associated with someone who had been banned. So if you've been banned, they don't ever want you back. Good luck with that policy Digg, DHCP is enough to keep users coming back as much as they desire. There are a lot of agencies out there running dozens if not hundreds of users through multiple proxies.

Perhaps that's why Zaibatsu says he'll be back.

Don't Put All Your Eggs in One Basket

One of the benefits of using a structured approach to social media marketing is that you're not building an account, you're building a set of relationships. When you're Stalking Big Game on Digg, the key is to find a diverse group of people that are likely to play the game. That doesn't mean "gaming the system," it means finding other like minded individuals that understand that there is an unstated quid pro quo in digging. I'll digg your submissions if they're good, and in return you'll digg mine. That's not to say that I'll digg any bit of spam that you want to post, but I will give you priority in what I look at when I'm digging. The scripting and the bots are really just about time savings, not explicitly gaming the systems. As we've always said, you shouldn't do anything with a script that you wouldn't do in person. It's just a macro for saving you time.

Likewise, you shouldn't be invested solely in a single network, even one as powerful as Digg. There are 1,000s of Social Networks to choose from when you're promoting your content. Pick a manageable number of those and spread your bets. Likewise, as a marketer I'd rather my company have several accounts on Digg in the 500 range rather than be a single Top 100 Digger.

Stop Using Scripts

The flip side of a crisis is opportunity, and this new rampage by Digg is an unbridled opportunity for social marketers. By shaking things up, they'll be removing the log jam at the top. If users start to rebel against the blind diggers as we suspect, "well behaved" social marketers will have a distinct advantage. The 80 users from the Top 1000 that have been banned for script usage just opened up a lot of slots for people to move up.

The next release of the PMS Social Suite is going to see some real changes in direction. For now, we're heavily suggesting to our users that they concentrate on the analytical features of the product and refrain from using the scripts. Digg has been rolling up script users by looking in their logs for Diggs coming from pages on their sites that do not have a Digg button. The Digg Friends Easy script started all of this, and our shoutback function used an improvement on that script. So for now, don't use that.

If you want to support your friends like MrBabyMan does, then go to the Manage Friends page, click the "Submissions" radio button, then click the "Go to Friend Page" button. Click each of the stories you want to Digg (you can set TabMixPlus to automatically open links in a new tab), then cycle through the tabs. This is pretty much what MrBabyMan does, and Digg isn't banning him, even though he has an 89.2% Blind Digging rate.

We'd appreciate some user input on whether we should try to come up with scripts that don't have the vulnerability that Digg spotted in Digg Friends Easy? But before you form an opinion, read the next section.

New Features Coming

Digg's crackdown on scripts is going to make things a lot better for PMS Social Suite Users. Given that it will take more time to support your friends, choosing which friends you support is going to be even more important. And instead of using free Greasemonkey scripts on Digg, you'll be much better off if you can do your analysis completely offline from Digg. The entire key will be to find users that will Digg your submissions -- you just can't afford to waste time with people that don't understand the game. If you've got the right tools, you'll have a distinct advantage over the people that have had the rug pulled out from under them.

Top Diggers will tell you that the key is to find the best content before anyone else does. To help our users with that task, the upcoming version of the PMS Social Suite will use a list of 200 sites that we've developed by analyzing what makes it to the front page of Digg. We have a database application that will be hitting that list continuously. When you visit our new dashboard, you'll be shown a list of "Hot Stories" that have not yet been submitted to Digg and are from a source that has Diggable content. Click the link and you'll get two tabs opened: one tab will have the actual article, and the other will have the Digg submission page with the URL filled out. You probably won't be able to beat MakiMaki to a post on Huffington Post, but your chances are excellent for being first to getting great content for your submissions.

Another key to building relationships on Digg is commenting. One of the best places to comment is on a story that has very few comments but is likely to go front page. Our dashboard will also have a section called "Hot Submissions to Comment." This is a list of submissions from the Top 100 Diggers with 3 or less comments. It also shows the current number of Diggs so you've got an idea as to whether or not it's going to hit. Chime in first with something witty and you'll get great visibility.

The Dashboard also shows the list of users that you're tracking and key statistics that are updated continuously. For instance, you can see a count of how many friends you have in the Top 100 and Top 1000. We've also calculated the number of friends you have that are "Solid" and "Weak" according to our algorithm.

We've also eliminated the need for you to run your own research jobs. We've set up a network of machines that cycle through our database and perform the research function for you. We currently have stats on over 26,000 Diggers for you to mine. We're doing much more in-depth research now, including finding Diggers with high rates of mutual friend support. We've got a list of hundreds of people that are very likely to become mutual and support your submissions. For each month of subscription you pay for, we'll provide you with a list of 10 high value friends. Sign up for a year and you'll start off with 120 very strong friends to seed your network.

But the biggest key to success is to establish an offsite friend network. The Top Diggers don't shout to each other, they send email and IMs back and forth asking for votes. The best friend that you can find is someone that has a very high rate of mutual voting, but also has a way to contact them offsite. Part of our new research service is that we look for links to known services such as AIM, email addresses, StumbleUpon, etc for a user. You can mark a user as an "offsite friend" and contact them through other means. You can store an email address for them in the database. Push a button and you can send an email to a list of users with the url of a story you'd like supported. It's just like what the Top Diggers do, but more efficiently.

And if you'd like to be considered as a friend to other PMS Social Suite users, you can mark your user as open in your profile. You'll see a list of stories other users are promoting, and you can mark your own stories to be promoted. Obviously, with the analytics you'll have a good idea of who is digging you, so be a good friend and you'll get back results.

How Soon?

Soon, very soon. A lot of this was already in the works before Digg started their rampage. I'd say we're 95% done right now. Stay tuned.

We've heard a comment from a number of "A-Listers" that all of your social media activity should be "organic." That you shouldn't use automation or do anything that isn't natural with sites like Digg, because somehow that's cheating.

Our question back is "What's so noble about carpal tunnel syndrome?" If you're using automation to do the same things you would do if you sat at the computer and clicked your mouse in a mind numbing session, what's the big deal? Is it the user's fault that most of these social networks have built such a brain dead and poor user interface that accomplishing even simple tasks requires minutes of clicking? Is it the user's fault that these sites take forever to load a page? Is it the user's fault that most of these sites have limited their APIs to the point of near uselessness?

What's the difference between using a script to accomplish simple tasks and hiring an intern or someone from India to do the same thing? Is an agency that pays a staff of people to mindlessly click on social sites all day somehow more magnanimous than the sole proprietor that uses a macro to accomplish the same thing? Do you really think that these big name consultants that charge several hundred dollars for a consultation are spending hours a day of their own time clicking their mice on social networks?

How about the use of a programmable keyboard or mouse? What's the difference between using a FireFox plugin like Greasemonkey that will click a few links for you and open a window and using a programmable keyboard that will do the same thing when you hit a function key?

How about using a browser plugin that automatically opens all links on a page in a new tab so that you can easily read the stories? That's a script, isn't it?

How about using a super high-speed internet connection? Doesn't that give you an unfair advantage over someone using dial up? Doesn't that put more of a load on the website? To be fair, shouldn't you be using a 56K dial up line to do your social networking?

If social networks would make simple tasks like unfriending 100 friends that are completely unproductive a one step operation, there wouldn't be a need to use scripts. Instead, they're trying to maximize page views. So frankly, using scripts helps them with that goal. If it weren't for automated scripts, a lot of their traffic and revenue would go away.

Do as They Say, Not As They Do

Don't think for a minute that the majority of the people pontificating about "organic" use of these sites aren't using automation themselves. We're not going to call anyone out by name, but by using our tool to analyze the friendship networks and voting habits of Top Diggers, it's quite clear that they're very automated and voting in blocks like crazy. Search your feelings, you know it to be true.

If you buy into the party line that only "organic" use of these sites is acceptable, you're just guaranteeing that you won't be able to compete with the "A-Listers" -- which, frankly, is exactly they way they'd like it. They're not in business to create competition. So if you'd always like to be in second place, listen to their advice.

I'll also point out that the same people that rail against using scripts to make social networking more efficient usually have installed ad blocker software. So who is really stealing bandwidth?

Won't I Get Banned?

True, if you do something crazy and Digg a few thousand stories in a few hours you're going to get caught. Especially if you're testing a script in development and it gets away from you! Not that I know anyone that has happened to or anything. But if your script has the appropriate pauses, you only vote a percentage of stories, and you do the same things a human would do then there's a very low probability of getting caught.

And frankly, you shouldn't be putting all your eggs into a single basket. Keep an offline record of your relationships. If you get banned, it's just a matter of a new IP address and adding back the relationships you've already built. Your tools can do that for you, can't they?

Keep in mind that the top users get forgiven when they get caught using a script. I've heard several instances of top diggers that got banned and reinstated the next day after promising to behave. They're still misbehaving; they're just doing a better job of not getting caught. But if you're not one of the top people, good luck even getting your emails answered.

It's How You Use Your Tools That Count

The same car that can be used by a drunk driver at 2:00AM can also be used to drive the kids to school at 8:00AM. The car isn't good or evil -- it's how it's used that matters. If you're using tools to spread spam the community is going to punish you anyway, so it's not going to work out. But if you use a tool to be more efficient and do the same things that you'd do anyway if you were willing to risk carpal tunnel syndrome and spend 10 hours a day clicking then there shouldn't be any problem.

The real question is "How much is your time worth?" If it's not worth $19.95/month to save a few hours a day of your time, then keep clicking. Otherwise, you really ought to look into automating some of your drudgery.