A lot of "experts" in social media have made the assertion that if you participate in a voting ring on any of the major social sites, you'll get caught. There is a mystique around the all-knowing data centers that can track your activities on their site. If you cheat, you'll get burned. It's that simple.

I'm not going to pass judgement on whether or not you should participate in voting rings. It's probably not good for your karma. But I am going to say that there is a lot of voting ring activity out there, and if you don't understand the issues around it you're going to be at a disadvantage.

The Rings Exist

It doesn't take much in the way of google searching to turn up a number of vote exchange networks. They're pretty blatant about it. Here are some of the major ones that I found with a cursory search:

• Piqqus - Formerly known as DiggBoss, Members exchange social votes on Digg, StumbleUpon and Propeller.
• SubmitterBot - Exchange Digg and StumbleUpon votes, part of a larger service
• 1rst Link - Exchange links on a huge list of social neworks, as well as a no-reciprocal link exchange.
• Spike The Vote - Formerly a Digg exchange site, was sold on Ebay and purchased by a Digger for $1,000 who shut it down.
• Stumblebot - Appears to be software that will generate stumbles. Not sure if this is a network or just a bot.
• Social Traffic Exchange - A forum for exchanging votes on several social media sites

There are lots more, but you get the idea. You'll notice I nofollowed those links because I don't want to encourage them. But the exchanges aren't limited to just forums and applications. Do a search for "social media" in Google and Yahoo Groups and you'll find several mailing lists all targeted at the same kind of activity.

This is Cheating!

Perhaps, but there is a ton of it going on. Is participating in one of these rings any different than the "A Listers" who send out 25 IMs in the morning to get the 15 votes on Sphinn required to get their articles to the Up and Coming section? Why is it always the same people getting to the front page on these sites? If you don't think there's some offsite networking going on in the social media world, you need to pull your head out of the sand.

Is it cheating when the system has become so corrupt that the way the "Big Names" get their stuff to the top is to rely upon soliciting votes from their friends? It's a self perpetuating cycle, because the people with offsite friend networks are the ones that get to the front page, and front page exposure on these networks is what leads even more people to follow you.

If you think it's possible for "great content" to simply rise to the top, then try this experiment. Go find the greatest Digg bait in the world, something that just can't miss. Submit it with an account that has no history and no friends. The only thing that's going to happen is that some other, more popular Digger is going to find your content and submit it again (ignoring your duplicate), and then it will get popular. This is a popular complaint about MrBabyMan -- people claim that he finds the gems with only a few votes and resubmits them in a different category.

The simple fact is that even the greatest content in the world requires promotion in order to get seen.

Analyze the Top Diggers

Here's an example of the activities of a top 100 Digger. You'd recognize the name, but I'm not going to out them. If you look at their history, they've been digging about 85 stories a day for the last two years. 39% of their submissions go popular.

How much work is 85 Diggs a day? If you put in 6 hours a day on the site, that's a Digg every 4.3 minutes. No breaks. No vacations. If you're taking the time to read the stories you're digging everything you read. This person also submits about 5 stories a day. And they blog a lot. And they participate in a lot of other social networks and are at the top of those too. And they've got a full time job. They either work 20 hours a day, or they've got some special help.

I suppose it's possible that they're just super-human and can Digg like that, but it's much more likely that they've got a bot or a Greasemonkey script that handles a lot of the load. Or there's an entire agency behind that persona doing all that work. Just vote the first five pages each day or the submissions of other popular Diggers, with a 4 minute delay. When you submit something, send an email blast to 25 buddies to get those first votes. Enough people follow this person that they can get most anything to the front page. They also do a good job of submitting Diggable material, but one wonders how the heck they're making money at it. Negative stories about McCain and Bush will always do well with the right care and feeding, but it's tough to monetize them.

Why Can't Social Sites Catch These People

It's mathematics, pure and simple. The problem is simply not computable in any reasonable amount of time.

Let's take our Top Digger in the above example and see if we could catch them by looking at the voting behaviors on their stories. The trick is that they send out 25 vote requests, but the pool of people they can request from is much larger, say 250. So for any given story, there's a 10% chance that a person out of the group will vote for it. And the average story gets a few hundred votes because they've become popular, so we're looking for 10% out of that.

This is a well understood problem in computer science. What we're trying to figure out here are the functional determinants in the data. We're saying that a submission by A leads to votes by B and C. If the variance is 0% -- in other words, every time A submits B and C vote, then it's pretty easy to spot. You can take a small sample of data, and just iterate through A,B,and C's behavior a single time and you'll find that there is an exact correlation. We can see that A functionally determines B and C.

But what if B & C only vote for A's stories 50% of the time? Now our nice and neat functional dependency algorithms won't work. We can't use a small random sample of data, we have to look at a much larger set in order to spot the trend. So instead of looking at 25 submissions to spot the trend, I'd have to look at all 2,500. And remember, out of the 1,000s of people that ever voted on a story submitted by A, I don't know who B & C are ahead of time. So I have to look at everyone that has ever voted on a submission by A. Now work the numbers if our voting pool only votes 10% of the time. If I look at our Top Digger's friends page I see that there are over 22,000 recent Diggs by people in their friend network. And that's a very small amount of Diggs compared to the total number of Diggs across all of their submissions. It's just not possible to spot the rings. If you had a billion dollars in venture capital and a giant supercomputer you still couldn't police it.

What Can Social Networks Do?

What is possible is to spot a ring if you have a hypothesis about who to look at ahead of time. For instance, let's say A is silly and submits something that is clearly spam. It gets 5 votes before it is marked as spam. Now checking the voting behavior of A vs 5 people is quite easy. And if you roll them up, what does it mean?

• You've taken out 5 people from a group of 250, which is pretty easy to rebuild.

• If you ban the Top Digger, you're opening yourself to the ultimate black hat attack. Want to take someone down? Just set up 5 fake accounts and have them digg the Top Diggers submissions 100% of the time. Then send a complaint to Digg that you've spotted a voting ring.
• Your process required manual intervention, which is quite expensive.

You can also send out employees to join these networks and participate, looking for people that are asking for their submissions to be voted up and banning them. They don't generally do this because someone can just ask for votes for someone else's submissions and have them wrongly accused of participating in the ring. If the sites are smart, they'll periodically insert stories from top users to be voted up. A black hatter could lay waste to hundreds of competitors by submitting their stories to various voting rings.

Likewise, they can track activity. If you vote a story every 2 seconds you're leaving a clear footprint. Except that people do that all the time without consequences on Digg. Witness the Greasemonkey scripts used by the bury brigade that automatically bury stories than contain certain keywords or from certain users. So if you're a top digger they're likely to check your history and if you do something like digg a bunch of stories without a pause you'll get caught.

There's no way they can catch everyone. They can't even catch a small percentage. What they can do is concentrate on policing their top users and clear spammers very carefully, and if they catch someone make their ban very public pour encourager les autres. And they can keep fostering the fantasy that anybody that cheats on a social network is going to get caught, aided and abbetted by "A List" people that did exactly that on their way up.

But if users stay away from submitting stories that are clearly spam, insert pauses in their voting, and limit their ring activity to around 10%, there's no way they're going to get caught. At least not until we get a few orders of magnitude in compute power available.

I'd like to thank everyone for their testing on the Social Suite with Digg Analytics and Automation. It was, well, interesting. I've done a lot of beta testing inside client sites but haven't really released a program into the wild since before the internet. (Remember FidoNet and shareware distribution? Yikes!)

At the end of the day we decided that it was usable enough to replace the old Digg Friend Finder. Which, given the number of daily users, was a pretty uncomfortable and tricky decision. However, the actual traffic on the free version of the Social Suite has gone up from the old Digg Friend Finder, so mission accomplished there.

Mainly, however, it was quite a learning experience for us in how people use automation software when it's not part of a larger corporate sponsored project.   We clearly recognized that individual or small company buyers had different price and function points, but the variable cost of time and overhead is so much less accounted for in smaller firms that a lot of our positioning was probably not necessary.  Fascinating. 

Social Suite Beta Test Pre-Natal Expectations

I was expecting a LOT of criticism for the UI. I quite like it and it has a lot of technical advantages from our standpoint, but it is not the typical UI.

Not one word.

I was also expecting people to balk at installing iMacros (especially since you have to install the previous version because of bugs in the new release) and running the Suite in its own Firefox window.

Not one word.

I thought there were too many columns of numbers in the Find Friends panel for people to really wade though them. It turns out people ignore the numbers they don't understand or think are unimportant. Fascinating.

We got a lot of good feedback about our documentation and how to help reduce the complexity of what the suite can do. Over the next week or so I'll be publishing some articles to help people use both the free and premium versions of the software.

Beta Test Post-Mortem

This is going to sound strange, but our take homes were:

1. Our target market uses paypal rather than Amex. We were startled.
2. People want videos rather than user manuals. I guess it's the YouTube phenom coming home to roost. I actually find it easier to write a manual. (Yes, I own a typewriter, why do you ask?)
3. We were right to go with value based pricing and to aim for "professional diggers."

Value Based Pricing

There are (broadly) two ways to price anything: cost or value. Walmart prices own-brand cornflakes a price+markup. Apple prices everything at value. The difference differentiates your market.

So when we decided to price the first version of the social suite we tried to balance off users, user time/value, revenue, support costs/expectations, server load, investment timeline, etc. We put a stopwatch on a lot of in-house testing, spoke to the alpha users extensively about the value proposition, and did some magnificent fiddling on a whiteboard.

And came up with a buck an hour.

If you value your time at more than a buck and hour and use digg to drive revenue, then you should be paying us to use the social suite. And our beta testers, as they converted to paying customers, confirmed this observation.

Why Not Charge More?

If you look around, there aren't that many SEO tools that successfully charge an admissions fee. So our goal was to establish a precedent and, as we add value and reduce time/cost we will raise our prices.

If You Missed the Beta

Look, if you were taking a nap under a lilly pad or something, just go to our contact us page and drop us a line and we'll help you out.

[Note -  don't put  slashes and plus signs in your  article title if you have SEO friendly  URL addresses that  mimic your title.  I'm just saying!]

Beta testing is a very strange thing to watch. Some people ask for access and do nada. Others use the software in ways that, frankly, are puzzling. Some people complain about everything ("I hate red" is my favorite). Others give you attached excel spreadsheets of bugs they want fixed and features they'd like to see. Stack ranked. Bless the OCD among us because they are the one true beta testers!

But what I really live for are emails like these:

I started using your Social Suite with the expectation that this was yet another silly Digg tool that would be "eh, clever" and not much more.

I was completely wrong. Once a week or so I usually comb through each of my four Digg users, in rotation, to look for people who are banned, or who have stopped using digg, or who have dropped me from their friend list so I'm shouting at an empty cubicle. It takes me, literally, all day to check the high points. So I spend 4 days/month grooming my network. I drive 100K+ hits/month onto my websites, so this is time well spent, though it is really boring.

I plugged my digg logins into your tool, hit "research," went to a soccer game, and when I came back the work was done.

So this thing saved me eight hours. The first day I used it. Plus I actually had a lot more information to make better decisions.

Then I noticed the "unfriend" button and realized that I could save another three or four hours a month.

I look forward to being a charter subscriber. Do I get a discount?

Wow. And no. :-)

It's been kind of dark on this blog, but we're in a whirlwind beta testing our Social Site Automation toolset.  We're going to open up the private beta to around 20 more people, so please feel free to contact me (olivertaco@promote-my-site.com) if you'd be interested in giving it a shot.

You should be familiar with social media marketing and have extensive Digg experience.  Plus you should be willing to break out into lots of smiles and a few giggles.   The software runs in FireFox (only) and requires iOpus iMacro.

This has been an interesting beta, and I'm composing some thoughts for a longer post.  Which might even have some smart stuff in it for other people heading into beta test. 

If you would be interested in beta testing our new social media automation product before it is released, please drop me an email.

You should be

• An experienced Digg user
• Wiling to install iMacro for Firefox
  
• To spend at least a few hours using the product (My guess is that you will, like I did, fall in love with this product, so it shouldn't be too painful.)

We're very excited about how this will accelerate your ability to be successful on digg.  And if you're of an analytical bent, you will love what you can find out about your (and others) friend networks.

We use filezilla as our Pointy Haired Boss friendly (*cough*) ftp front end. It rocks, and it is free - what more can you ask for?

Lately I've been testing screen capture software and have been spending a lot of time rebooting my PC (install/uninstall) and reconnecting to our servers, shoving a video up, testing it on several different computers. Rinse and repeat.

And it was really bugging me to have to change the destination directory to /home/pmsforms/images. Sure, it was three mouse clicks in a sea of other mousing, but my backbrain was telling me I was being a luser.

Timesaving Tip

Yeah, how stupid am I? Go to the File->Site Manager dialogue box, go to the Advanced tab and set the default remote directory.

Heck, if you have more than one directory that you use a lot you could create two different profiles that take you where you need to be.

Wish I'd thought of looking for this about a thousand mouse clicks ago!

I don't think you can apply a pure Turing test (human or robot?) to Diggers, because Digg is a highly complex system and you can't know as much as you need to.

But I can look at a diggers profile and see that 24,000 posts in 90 days say.... Robot. And I can look at his "friend" network and see a lines of robots stretching out to the horizon.

And robots run by not very bright programmers.

Is Your Fan A Robot?

Let's just pick a random and very active digger, OptimusPrime01, off of one of my submits:

He's been a member, as of today, for around 210 days. Let's look at his activity:

He has 10,000+ diggs in 210 days. Given some vacation time in there we're looking at 50 per day. That is a LOT of time digging. But if you work at the DMV or IBM I guess you have plenty of time.

I think Opty is a human because he passes a curosory turing test:

• An eclectic voting record - all around the block
• I've shouted him back a few times and he doesn't always vote.
• There are 221 comments, which is more than one a day.
• The comments are clearly from someone who is a native English speaker, so no obvious outsourcing
• His profile is very human and has had a lot of changes.

The only thing that makes me raise my eyebrows is that his "popular" record is very very high at 9%, which either means that he's a hardworking SEO/SEM or just a dedicated digger. I come down on the side of digger with a lot of free time on his hands! (Heck, SEO's are allowed to be diggers, as long as they don't brag. :-)

Commentary on Comments

I have many friends whose native language is not English and am from the deep South, so I'm pretty relaxed about syntax and vocabulary. But it is a dead giveaway when a "23 year old girl from New York" uses words like "compliance" or is shouting you with: "Please to digg rapidly my submits." It's a dead giveaway for a robot or a sock puppet.

Human Or Robot, Part Deux?

I recently posted a digg (Best. Digg. Shout. Ever.) about a hysterical shout I got from a user called SteJules. I admit that I didn't take much time before deciding to post his shout because (without torturing you with the screen shots), he'd been a digg member for 31 days and had over 10K diggs and had a 20% hot rate. You don't have to look at stuff like that for a minute to realize it is a robot plus a really good linkbait writer.

If you looked more closely at his stories, half of them were chaff to disguise the other half linking to his websites. So his hot-rate for the stuff he cared about was closer to 40%.

Wow.

He's been banned now, so obviously discretion is the better part of robotics. But his stories are still up, still flowing traffic to his websites, and still garnering links from bloggers that dug his stuff. And since digg membership is free, it is hard to see what the human behind SteJules lost.

Robot Networks?

Oh, no doubt. Let's look at one of SteJule's friends, oboy. He's been a member since Jan/8/2008, or around 90 days. He has 24,000+ diggs. To avoid having you do what I did and drop the zero, that works out to 266 diggs/day.

[Update: DoshDosh says that oboy is human, but I still say that that rate of daily diggs is astounding. If each navigate/review/digg took 10 to 15 seconds each you'd have an hour of pretty furious activit a day!]

[Double update: I should not do math in public.  I have corrected my math above from 400 to 266 diggs/day.]

How Does A Human Fight Robots?

Don't. You can't. And it is not your job to police digg. They have staff and tools - I think the average lifespan of an obvious robot on digg is just a few months. I suspect that oboy will be gone shortly.

My suggestion is to take a walk among the less popular stories and digg/friend those people.

And look at your "fans" before you friend them. If they look too active or otherwise too good to be true, well, you might want to avoid them.

We all know that some backlinks never make it to technorati and therefore are less likely to be "discovered" by google.  And all your backlinks are important for SERPS, high quality technorati traffic, etc, etc.  So we built a tool that will automatically generate pings to technorati and pingomatic for all your backlinks.  And it is free.  (Well, it's ad-supported, but that is close enough to the same thing.)

How and Why

If you'd like an architectural explanation of how it work, you can read All Your Links are Pingworthy.  Here is how to download and install iMacro and why we chose iMacro as a SEO automation framework.

Operations - Getting There

It's quite simple, really.  You can go to our website, Promote-My-Site and click on the left hand side toolbar link for Promote-My-Site Ping.

Note: The really cool screen grab above is from FireShot, which saves me five minutes a day, easy.  Get it if you do a lot of screen shots!

 

Using the Promote-My-Site Pinger

Once you get to the right page you'll see some explanatory text and:

Which is not so useful, so put in your URL and click PingBacklinks.  Go ahead and click through the dialog box telling you that this might take a while - it's actually very very fast but testing feedback said that we needed something like that.  You'll see:

This means that Yahoo had 5,087 backlinks and we are 50% of the way turning those Yahoo API'd backlink records into technorati pings for an iMacro script.  (Now is a good time to download iMacro if you haven't already done it!)

When the process is complete you will see this button:

One of the tricky things here is that Yahoo's API will only let us get 1,000 records, so you may want to split up your website into a set of strong pages, or take each RSS feed and run it through.

Trouble Shooting

Honestly, we have had a great limited beta (aka QA sucker) round and haven't found any problems we can't fix.  If you start to get 0 results for things that you know have backlinks you may have hit Yahoo's query limit for the day.  But the cool thing is that, because this runs out of an Ajax app on your browser, you can just grab a new IP and you're off.

Drop us an email (help@promote-my-site.com) if you have any issues and we'll help.  You can also find us on Sphinn and SEOMoz, so if PM works better for you then you can reach us there pretty easily.  We'd also be delighted to hear any suggestions for improvements and additions.

If you want your content to do well (link juice, readers, fame and fortune- whatever) you either have exactly three options:

• World Class Link Bait
• Pounding Out A Thousand Singles
• Don’t Be A Friend To Mankind

Baiting a Dull Hook

I know, I know, there are lots of articles about how to create popular content for so-called boring industries. Some of the better ones are:

• Is Your Industry Too Boring for Linkbait?
• SeoMoz’s Most Excellent Jane Presentation
• SeoBook’s Digg is for Dweebs

But you know, mostly that is simply not going to work. It’s not that this isn’t good advice, it’s just that you can’t really operationalize it. Some of your content has to be more prosaic to get keywords, concepts, and basic communications out to the reading public. So none of that can be linkbait.

And, some days, well, even the most talented writer is going to look at this headline:

• Top 100 Reasons Japonata Front Loaders Rock

And go to Red Robin and get drunk at lunch.

So then you’ve got to play:

Paycheck Baseball

When I was on the baseball team in high school my coach told me that you have to pound out every single hit to convert them to singles. There is no “trick” here – you just have to turn out content every day, post it to social networking and bookmarking services every day.

Pounding out the singles on the social networking sites has to be the keystone of your overall strategy, and is why I keep saying that you have to look past Digg, Reddit, Propeller, etc and start efficiently using smaller sites (Rambling Irishman - http://www.the-ri.com/pligg/, etc). Some other people have started mentioning their top 18 or 20 sites, and that is useful to expand your horizon.

Go ahead, write the linkbait when you can (and it’s going to be a very small percentage of your content, realistically) but until then, get your content out and

Practice Retail Politics

If you want your very articulate article on why

• Japonata Front Loaders with NEW Silicone Impregnated Hoses Save You Valuable Maintenance Dollars

to get read, then you’re going to have to find “friends” online who are interested in stuff like that. Yes, they exist.

In other words, you have to go find people who have written or voted on articles on heavy equipment, maintenance, etc, etc. Not every one on these sites is only voting on Ron Paul and pictures of cats in the loo.

You need to find those people with similar interests, friend them, vote on their stories, “shout” to them when you post something in their strike zone, etc. Duh, I know, But go back to my baseball analogy – you have to pound it out over time to get a statistical advantage so you can win more than you lose.
How about next time you submit a story you go find one similar story, vote on it, and friend the author? Then you can shout them on your next post. Over time you’ll get a good network. You don’t really want to be a friend to the entire population of any site – it’s borderline abusive and it simply doesn’t work.

Remember, don't friend everyone in the world, make sure they submit or vote on stories that are in your strike zone. And you should expect many of them not to friend you back. Plus you have to respond to their shouts, not just shout to them. You learned all that in first grade.

So Now What?

Well, it’s not rocket science

• Create the best content you can, regularly if not every day
• Use a lot of social sites in an efficient way
• Utilize and contribute to friend networks for visibility

It’s not a Fast Food strategy, but over time you’ll outrun your competitors, especially the ones quick out of the gate with flash success and no long term focus.

Free SEO Tool To Help

So how can we help? Well, we've built a tool, Digg Friend Finder, that will help you search out and friend people on digg who have similar interests. We'll explain how it all works in the next post.

One of the first things that might warn you that Novasoft's SutumbleBot is a social network spamming tool is their blatant ripoff of StumbleUpon's logo.

LogoLicious Infringement

StumbleBot's logo:

StumbleUpon's logo:

Oh, wait, never mind, completely different - one has a blue background and the identical blue/green graphic is 15 degrees out. My bad.

Danger Will Robinson, Stumble Spambulator Coming Our Way

I think the other 'look out' moment is when the sales pitch is all about how to do something without getting caught:

Stumblebot is an easy to use application that lets you create thousands of Stumbleupon accounts, stumble your websites with those accounts and generate thousands of unique visitors from Stumbleupon in no time.

Stumblebot also allows you the option to post randomized relevant tags and reviews for these stumbles. It also includes a username checker and uses rotating proxies and user configurable delays between posts.

I am not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure that if you're not violating the TOS doing all that, well, then, they must not have much of a TOS.

Novasoft - Sounds Familiar

Yes, we reviewed their Tag Automater and were not impressed - it costs almost $300 to purchase and then there is a $67/month "service" fee. It seemed like a lot of money for a tool that didn't do much.

Tool Overview

This tool is more reasonably priced at around $150, and even has a $1/2-day demo version. I was about set to pay the buck and give it a try, then I thought to look around to figure out how to terminate the demo period. Nothing. I looked on the support ticket area - this product wasn't even listed. So I decided to NOT get involved in a pay pal hassle.

I sent them an email, but as they did not respond to my previous emails, I don't really expect a response again.

I will say that, given Stumble's architecture, that it would be very possible to patch together a tool that would let you 'fake stumble' your posts with a low likelihood of getting caught.

How Worthwhile is Fake Stumble Traffic?

I had a friend who owned an okay-ish Italian place some years ago. He'd let me eat dinner for half price if I'd sit in the window seat and give the thumbs up to people who stopped to read the menu. But the food was only OK, so the people never would come back. I have to believe that if you're counting on people from stumble coming back after falling for this false-trail system then you've not quite understood what makes stumble traffic work.

Conclusion

I think self-stumbling your content is fine, and if you write good content then you'll get an appropriate level of traffic. I'd avoid this social spamming tool - not only are you violating Stumble's TOS but you're also putting your focus and emphasis in the wrong place.