Many people become frustrated when they hit the 2,000 following barrier in Twitter. It's a limit imposed by Twitter that few people know about when they start but most will run into. In short, it's an anti-spam device by Twitter. You can follow up to 1,000 people in a day, until you've followed 2,000 people. After 2,000, you can only follow 10% more people than are already following you.

A Case Study

Let's take the example of the campaign shown in the graph. Following 1,000 people a day is a recipe for a quick suspension. Twitter closely monitors brand new accounts for churning activity. You're much better off to follow about 300 people/day for the start of your campaign. So you sign up for the free version of our PMS Social Suite and enter a brand new account with a snazy new background, a good profile image, and a few well chosen tweets. Since the list we're using is so powerful, you're getting a follow back ratio of about 60%. In a mere 7 days you've followed 2,000 people and have 1,200 followers. That's very cool, so you upgrade to the paid version and put the campaign completely on autopilot.

What Happened?

Hey, who are these fly by night guys from Promote My Site? The next day the software didn't follow any more than the 2,000 you had followed the day before! Actually, that's not what happened at all. You've hit the 2,000 barrier with an out of balance account. With only 1,200 followers, you can't add anyone because of the 10% limit. The software will also only cull a maximum of 5% of the people you're following, which means at most you'll cull 100 people that aren't following you back. So if you cull 100 people, the software can only add back 100 people and perhaps only 60 of those will follow you back. So the going is going to be very slow for the next few weeks as you're able to gradually cull more people and follow more people each day.

The good news is that the software is relentless and accurate. It doesn't forget to perform your actions each day, although you might. Gradually, the account will come back into balance and you'll be able to follow more people. So the long flat area in the following line in the graph? The account is stuck at the 2K barrier until the followers are brought back into balance, and then the graph slopes sharply upwards because as you get past 2,000 you're able to increase the number of people that you follow each day.

By the end of 60 days you're at 16,000 followers! You had a tough few weeks as you slogged it out through the 2K barrier, but slow and steady wins the race. Now you're seeing real results.

Lather, Rinse, Repeat

Just like the instructions on the shampoo bottle, this is a good time to start over with a new account. When you're in the 15K range you'll be at the top of many directory listings for any niches you want to market to. Make sure you've signed up for directories such as Twellow. Guess how these are sorted? Yep, by follower count. The number of followers you have is social validation. By being near the top of the list you'll start to pick up followers in your niche because you're there. If you had tried to build a "quality" account by hand from scratch you'd be #2043 on the list and be seen as a mere peon. Now you're a player. If you've been tweeting on your topic you'll be rolling.

Now go ahead and create a new Twitter account and enter that information into the PMS Dashboard. Just click Edit, change the Twitter username and password, and click Update. You can switch your Twitter account as much as you desire -- whatever account is active when the process runs it what will get run. It's far more powerful to have 5 accounts with 15K followers than 1 account with 75K followers. Losing an account to a suspension won't hurt you very much, and you can have your accounts retweet the news from your main account.

The Benefits of Paid Vs Free

Most people hit the 2K barrier while using a free account. If they aren't culling their own non-mutuals, the system will appear to have stopped working. It hasn't stopped, it just can't do anything because once you've hit your limit of following 2,000 people you have to remove some of the people you're following in order to follow more. Don't fall to the temptation to mass unfollow the 1,000 people that aren't following you back in one shot. The 2K barrier is also the time that Twitter seems to pay attention to accounts to see if they're going to start churning. It's far safer to remove 50-100 people/day until you get over the hump. The fastest way over the hump is to have been removing those people along the way as you grew so that you arrive at the 2K barrier with a fairly balanced account. If you're using the paid service you won't run into that problem. You'll just see a flattening of the graph for about 10 days and then you'll be back to the steady growth you had become accustomed to. Go ahead and Sign up!

We haven't had too many complaints about our service, but the most frequent complaint we get seems to be "Your software works too well!"

A lot of people have been surprised at how many followers they pick up, even with the free trial. The average seems to be about 1,000 new followers over the course of a week. For a few people, this has been enough to decide they don't want any more.

There's an easy solution to this: just go to your Dashboard, click Edit, then click Delete. The next day you'll get an automated message reminding you that you need to enter data if you want the service to work, and then you'll be done. Any record we have of your Twitter information will be gone and you won't end up in the next processing batch.

You Might Not Be Thinking About This Right

We've said several times that you shouldn't use this service for your primary, personal account. Aside from the danger that you could get banned (a small risk, but it can happen and you've been warned), it also means that your personal timeline will see a huge influx of followers. If you don't want to see that, then just create a separate business account and run that through the system. Don't mix business and pleasure.

It also comes down to diversifying your social portfolio. Do you really want to put all your eggs in one basket? If you're targeting five different niches, then you should have five different Twitter accounts -- at least!

Twitter automation is really hot right now. The strategy is working quite well. Will it work forever? Probably not. The only thing constant in Internet Marketing is change. You're not paying any money to Twitter, which means they can do pretty much whatever they want and you don't have recourse. Let's say things change dramatically in six months. If you've been following a particular strategy on a single account and that account becomes worthless, you've lost everything. But if you've got several accounts with different strategies, it's like riding out a downturn in the market with a diversified portfolio. It just doesn't make sense, from a business perspective, to put all your bets on a single account.

How to Keep Track of it All

There are lots of ways to deal with a flood of data in your twitter stream. If you're using the Twitter html interface, you're in a horse and buggy while being passed in the autobahn. It's quaint, but ultimately dangerous.

Our personal preference for a client is Tweetdeck. There are others, that's just the first one we came across that really worked well. If you've got a huge number of people you're following but are only interested in a few key areas, just create a real time search on those keywords. Tweetdeck will display tweets in a separate column that match that search. Now you're right on top of things in real time. You can have a huge net and personal interaction with the key prospects you're looking for.

Let's say there is a small group of people that you really want to follow. You can create a group and display just tweets from that group in a column.

Your RSS reader is also a great way to keep track of tweets in near real time. Look at a Twitter profile page. Down at the bottom of the right sidebar you'll see an rss feed for that user, such as Lt_Draper's RSS feed. You can load that into your rss reader and you'll see the tweets from that user arrive.

Or perhaps you'd like to follow a group of people with RSS. Just create a Yahoo Pipe like Don and Oliver's RSS Feeds. That pipe shows how simple it is to create a mashup of multiple RSS feeds. Click "Edit Source" and you can see how easy it was to build.

You Can Still Be Personal and Popular

There seems to be the misconception among many Internet Marketers that you have to make a choice between having a lot of followers and having quality followers. There's a group of people that think hand picked, delicately crafted follower lists have higher quality than huge lists gained through automation.

Anybody would agree that specifically targeted leads are better than shotgun leads in their eventual quality. But there doesn't have to be a choice between the strategies. Why can't you use automation to build up a large following while you're using manual methods to specifically target people? Automating just means that you have more time for higher value activities. I'll take a list of 30,000 followers, about 1,000 of which were carefully targeted, over a list of 1,000 carefully targeted followers any day.

The benefit to that approach is social proof. If you've got a larger following, the people you follow will see you as more credible than the guy with 60 followers. If you're concerned that people will be put off by your huge following, then run an account that is only handcrafted leads and a few others that are automated.

Find out for yourself. Experiment, measure, and repeat until you find what works. Just don't let the preconceptions you've formed without experience or data color what your'e seeing.

Oh yeah, there's a free trial available: PMS Social Suite. You didn't really expect me to forget to plug what we're selling?

Are you wasting your days whale watching? No, I don't mean spending time on vacation. I mean that special brand of fun you can only have when Twitter is acting completely out of sorts like it has all afternoon today. Half the time a page load times out. A few times they've even put up the "Twitter is over capacity message" but haven't even served up a fail whale.

We're Used to It

As long time Twitter users we're used to it. Is there any other web business where users would put up with such a high rate of failure? Slow response times and sporadic failures are a weekly occurence with Twitter. When Google went down for an hour it made huge news, but people shrug off Twitter going down like a piece of moldy bread. The beauty of it, from Twitter's standpoint, is that when they're having trouble, their user's can't even tweet about it! And when they come back people make a collective sigh of relief and go right back to Twittering.

It's a Problem if You're in Business

The problem with whale watching is that if you're depending upon Twitter to promote your business these outages cost you time. If you're following a manual methodology for adding followers you're going to eat up a lot of time. If you're trying to add twitter followers, the key is to keep up a steady amount of activity, every day.

Let's say you've become completely motivated and want to add a lot of Twitter Followers so you can have an effective marketing impact. You decide that every day you're going to spend a few hours following people on Twitter. Unfortunately, when the Fail Whale surfaces it's easy just to quit that activity and move on to something else. The chances are you'll forget to come back to your Twitter Following task. The next day you do a little less, and within a few weeks you've completely stopped. In another month you decide "Gee, I really ought to get back to that."

The problem with your manual method is that your competitors might not be doing it. Instead of spending an hour a today for a month following people on Twitter, they might have spent $39.95 for a month of the PMS Social Suite and had the autopilot run for several hours a day against an advanced database of people targeted within their niche and likely to follow them back. Perhaps you're proud of your 2,500 followers. They're adding that many followers every week.

What you're really saying by insisting upon spending an hour a day on something you could automate is that your time is only worth $1.33/hour. If that is all your time is truly worth, then perhaps this internet marketing thing isn't your cup of tea...

When the fail whale beaches itself a server based automation system will slog through. If you've installed software on your own machine to do the same thing, your environment slows down with Twitter. A server based solution that you can just set on autopilot and forget about it makes the most sense.

I'm Afraid My Account Will Get Banned

That's a reasonable fear. Which is why you shouldn't put all of your eggs in one basket. You shouldn't have a single account, you should have a stable of accounts, targeted at the various niches you're going after. If you've invested a lot of time and money building a single account, don't automate it. Create another account and use the automation to build it's followers. When you tweet, use the new account to retweet what you just said.

We have not had a customer get an account banned as a result of using our software. But obviously we can't guarantee that it won't happen. Twitter doesn't seem to mind the kinds of things our software does. Our customers have added 330,142 followers in that last two weeks. That's a lot of activity. Twitter has every motive to have as much activity among their user base as possible. They need to overcome the Oprah drop off effect (A lot of people signed up after Oprah talked about Twitter, and a month later their accounts went dormant). But that could change and Twitter could go to war against the power users much like Digg did. So don't put your eggs all in one basket. Get a lot of eggs, and a lot of baskets.

The pros in this business are all using automation. If you're shying away from automation because you're afraid of losing your account with 500 hard earned followers, you're getting your lunch eaten by the competition and you don't even know about it. They're getting more clicks than you have followers. You can't compete with that without automation.

Go ahead and sign up for a free account. Just register and click on the PMS Social Suite link. You know you want to.

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:

Chris Lang is running an unbelievable contest over on his blog. He's giving away a copy of his book, a ton of extra goodies, a 90 day subscription to our software, and a bluetooth headset. You don't have to buy anything, just do a little bit of analysis.

All you have to do is come up with a feature that we should add to the PMS Social Suite. The person submitting the best suggestion wins the contest.

Get over there and make your entries! If you're already a PMS Social Suite user, you can use the coupon he'll give you to extend your current subscription for another 90 days! I know of some suggestions that our current users have made that we haven't gotten around to yet that would make perfectly good entries.

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'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.