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.

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.

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.

We've gotten a lot of feedback from our users about the PMS Social Suite. Some of been enhancements, others have been some pretty hard to find bugs. In the spirit of openness, we're going to publish the list of enhancement requests and outstanding defect reports we currently are tracking in our Bugzilla system.

You don't use Bugzilla? You really should take a look at it. We use Bugzilla internally for just about anything. In addition to being a great (and free) defect management system, we use it for all kinds of project tracking and workflow tasks. It can really improve your productivity.

We've started posting defect reports and enhancement requests in our PMS Social Suite Forum. If you run into a problem, this would be a good place to look for a solution or to report it. Of course, you can always just email us and we'll be glad to help out too.

The Current List

Here's what the current enhancement and defect list looks like:

We'd really appreciate your feedback, so if you have opinions on the relative importance of these items or have something else you'd like to see implemented, go ahead and reply in the forum.

Sometimes your Digg friends just don't know when to quit.

We've all seen the person that seems to have just discovered the shout button and sends us 20 spams, er shouts, a day. We've been smart enough to turn off the email notfication for new shouts, but it's still clogging up our shout pages.

We don't want to lose them as a friend, because frankly they send good stuff once in a while and they digg our stuff, but there's just no way in Digg to get them to cut it out. It's either receive every shout or stop being friends.

A Script to Block Those Bothersome Shouts

Now there's a solution. If you haven't already, go install Greasemonkey. Really. Go do it right now. Then install our new Greasemonkey Script to Block Digg Shouts. After you have Greasemonkey installed you just click on the link and the script will install itself. You can make things more efficient by right clicking on the Greasemonkey icon, selecting Manage User Scripts, and then moving the Digg Shout Blocker to the top of the list -- that will make it get executed first. Note that Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension, so you'll have to install Firefox if you haven't already done that.

We have both Freemium (free to registered users) and Premium (paid) versions of our software. You'll need to be at least a registered user of Promote-My-Site to use this tool, because you'll need to set up an account on the PMS Social Suite. The freemium version will do everything you need. You'll want to follow the installation instructions. You don't actually have to install Imacros in order to use the shout block capabilities, but there are so many other features that you're going to want to install it as well. We have to require registration because we need to maintain a database record of who you're trying to ignore.

Once you've registered, go to the tool and click on the Profiles tab. Click the Add button and enter your Digg Username and Password, then click the Add button at the bottom. Now go to the Manage Friends tab. Your Digg Username should be filled in already, so click the Refresh From Digg button. The API calls will run and you'll get your grid populated with your current friends.

Let's say we're getting a lot of unwanted shouts from Oliver Taco. We can enter his name in the Friend Name field then click Query and we'll see this:

Now we just click the Toggle Block button and then Query again and we'll see that OliverTaco now has a status of Yes for Blocked. We've now marked him in our database as someone that we don't want to see their shouts.

How it Works

The Promote My Site server maintains a database of which friends you've decided to block. The Greasemonkey script checks that database each time you view your shout pages in Digg. If it sees someone on the blocked list, it runs a bit of code that mimics pressing the delete button on the shout. Viola, that user can no longer shout to you!

The script runs entirely in your Firefox browser. Other than the fact that you're able to delete shouts fairly quickly, there's no way for the Digg server to tell what you're doing. It does the same thing as if you had kept a spreadsheet of digg friends you want to ignore and delete each shout from them every time you load a shout page. Except it's a lot easier.

Blocking shouts is permanent. When the page loads, the delete code is run and they'll really be gone. But you can always just go back to the PMS Social Suite and toggle the Blocked status of a user back again.

Of course, if you block everybody that's shouting eventualy you'll just get back a blank page from Digg. You can see how many shouts were deleted by looking at the Shouts Received tab on your Digg page. The script adds (n Ignored) in italics right next to it to show you how many were ignored.

BTW, while I used OliverTaco as an example, I wouldn't suggest blocking his shouts. The rumor is that he's pretty good about using the PMS Social Suite and if you send him good stuff and reciprocate, he's very likely to Digg your shouts. So is LtDraper.

Other free Greasemonkey scripts we suggest to enhance your digging experience are Help Digg Your Incoming Shouts and Quickly Delete Your Shouts. They're part of the install process for the PMS Social Suite anway.