Last August we did a post on Voting Rings in Social Networks. At the time there were a number of sites trying to cater to people that wanted to exchange votes with other social network users. The "industry" has changed quite a bit since then, and it bears re-examination.

First, let's define what we mean by a vote exchange site. These are websites that allow their users to "trade" their votes on social networks for votes for their own sites. It formalizes the "I'll scratch your back if you'll scratch mine" paradigm in which most social network users participate. While when building up a friend list on Digg or StumbleUpon it is expected that your friends will vote for your stories in exchange for you voting on theirs, these sites formalize that process. They track who is voting on what and make sure that your time is not wasted by voting for submissions by other users that don't return the favor.

Isn't This Evil?

The social media purists will scream "Spammers!" when they see these sites. To the people that use these sites for the love of the social web and not for marketing it probably seems that way. But for those marketers not riding unicorns and chasing rainbows, it's just a fact of life.

We're not going to pass judgement on these activities. Some of these sites proclaim that "you should not vote for things you don't like" in order to avoid violating the TOS of the social networks. The plain and simple fact is that a lot of vote exchanging takes place in social networking. The top social network marketers are all doing it, if not explicityly through one of these voting rings then implicitly in the relationships that they develop. If you think you can compete with them without undertaking this kind of activity, then perhaps social network marketing is not for you.

Review of The Leading Sites

Interestingly enough, the sites we spotted last August are mostly still around. That's amazing given that Digg's legal team has been active and sent a cease and desist letter to uSocial.net, a site that claims to be able to sell Diggs, Stumbles, and Props.

All of these sites have some problems in common:

• You Don't Know Who You're Voting With - Everybody that uses these sites is in one giant pool. If Digg decided to go after one of these sites, all they would have to do is sign up, submit a few articles, and then see who votes on them. We have very good reason to believe that these social networks do exactly that.
• The Article Quality is Poor - Since you don't know the other members in your voting ring on these sites, you'll see a lot of "Cheap Viagra" and "Hot Babes" type submissions that you'll be asked to vote on. If you're using a throwaway social voting account to do the votes then that isn't so bad, but you can't build up your primary account using these sites. And there's a lot of junk to wade through which makes using the sites difficult. And if the social networks want to find people to ban, a good place to start is the people voting for those spammy submissions.
• You Could Get Sold Out - Given the "fly by night" nature of some of these sites, do you really think that if one of these rich social networks offered the webmaster a few thousand dollars for a copy of their user list they'd keep mum?
• They Might Leave a Footprint - Most of these sites have you click on a link to take you to the story to vote. The problem with that is that if they haven't handled setting the referrer correctly, where you came from may very well show up in the logs of the social networking sites. Again, you'll be signing yourself up for a trip to ban city.
• They're Centralized and Not Cell Based - There's a reason guerrilla fighters work in cells, where no one person knows everyone else in the organization. These sites are all centralized. So if they get penetrated, everybody gets rolled up.

Now while you may not be concerned with having your throwaway social networking account banned, you should be concerned that the social networks may trace your activity back to the sites you were promoting and ban those sites. Getting your site banned on all the major social networks could put a serious crimp in your marketing plans. But this could be used in a devastating blackhat attack on a competitor's site!

So let's look at some of the leading sites:

• SUExchange - This is a straight stumble exchange. At the time of this post, they claimed to have 3,891 users, 85,874 votes, and 9,501 sites in their system. That's a big ring! The problem with this site is that the verification method is quite time consuming. First, you vote on a site. Then you use their site to send a message to the owner of that site to verify that you stumbled it. So you could end up stumbling a lot of sites without ever getting credit. Worse yet, the owner of the site has to know who you are and that you voted through the exchange in order to verify you. You're letting a complete stranger know that you're part of the system.
• StumbleUdon - This one is downright scary. You give them your stumbleupon user name and password and they use a bot to perform stumbles on your behalf. I guess the real question here is how many people are foolish enough to do this?
• StumbleXchange - Another straight stumble exchange, this site claimed to have 6,689 members and 126,694 stumbles in their system. Which is odd because they were showing only 2 users online and the website was down for a few hours when I was trying to research it. The way this one works is quite concerning as well. In order to vote, you friend the owner of the site you're voting on, then vote on their submission. After you've done that 10 times you click a button to have StumbleXchange verify that the votes were made. I don't vote on anything, but three of the accounts (the top ones) that it suggested were all marked as "under investigation" by StumbleUpon. And since friending on StumbleUpon now requires that the recipient approve the friend request, this seems like it could be a rather drawn out process. But the worst thing was that rather than take me to the article page, it took me to the Stumble review page for the article. Can you say footprints?
• Social Traffic Exchange - This is a forum for exchanging social votes. It's up to you to verify that the votes were cast, and there's a clear record for anyone that wants to see who is participating in the scheme.
• Piqqus - Appears to still be going strong. This site allows you to exchange Diggs, Stumbles, and Props. It's smart enough to verify the votes on each of those networks itself, and they appear to know what they're doing with the referrer data. Other than the generic problems with these sites in general, Piqqus seems to have its act together.
• 1rstlink - This looks like it has potential, but it only has 50 users and while it covers many other networks than Digg, only the tasks in Digg seem to not be mostly spam. I had an account on this last summer and it never seemed to turn into actual votes even though I was voting the tasks at the time. If it weren't for the generic problems of these sites in general, I'd say this one could be a leader if it could get some momentum. I also can't see how they're making money, so that may explain the lack of momentum.

If you're desperate for traffic, then these sites might fit your needs. There are definate risks involved, but they all have the potential for driving traffic to your site and they're free if you don't count doing the work.

But there has to be a better way to manage working in a social voting group. I wonder what that could be? Subscribe to our RSS feed and you'll be likely to find out!

What exactly does a social media professional do when they're shepherding a story to the front page of a news site? Aside from all of the other support activities that surround having strong profiles, being an active member in the community, and building off site relationships with as many people as they can, the tactics for getting to the front page really just consist of:

• Prepare the article. This may sound simplistic, but there are a lot of factors to consider. For instance, many people make the mistake of not putting a "Digg This" badge at the top of the article in plain sight even though they're targeting Digg. If you're going to promote an article, you have to make it easy for people to vote. Whatever sites you're targeting (Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Propeller, etc), make sure that it's easy for your users to vote for your story.
• Submit the article. There are certain times of the day that articles should be submitted, and you should only submit from a profile that can carry the article. Which also means not always submitting your own articles but getting someone powerful to do it for you.
• Solicit Your Friends. The professionals will maintain a list of people that they can call upon for votes when they need them. Newbies often make the mistake of emailing/IMing everyone they know when they first submit the article, which means that the article gets an initial burst of activity (from the same people all the time) and then dies out. The algorithms on most sites will recognize this pattern. What the algorithms are really looking for is a steady increase in interest. The professionals work their list throughout the first 24 hours until they get to the front page. If you've got 200 people you can ask for votes, you'll want to spread that out to 10-15 votes per hour.
• Defend Your Turf. Get some of your friends to make positive comments on the article early on. The bandwagon effect can be quite powerful. Especially if you're submitting material that is somewhat commercial in nature, it's only a matter of time before somebody comments on the article about why it is lame and they're burying it. Get on that right away and get several people to comment back defending the value of the article. Keep a reserve of votes that you can call on because when the "Digg Mafia" tries to knock your story out you'll need votes to fight back. (Note that while Digg is the example, this behavior happens across most social networks.)

Lather, rinse, repeat. I've seen pros literally babysite an article around the clock to get a front page. People think that the top social media marketers just drop articles on sites and watch the traffic roll in. In fact, it's very hard work. Getting to the front page can bring in a ton of traffic, but it's far from easy.

But I Don't Have Time For This!

If you're an internet marketer then being a social media pro probably requires more time than you've got available. There are a lot more components to your business. So your options are:

• Outsource Your Social Media Marketing - You can hire other people to do this part of the business for you. The going rate for a guaranteed front page on Digg seems to be about $3,000 USD. That may seem like a lot of money, but a successful front page on Digg can bring 100,000 visitors, so your cost is about $0.03/click, which is a lot cheaper than most pay per click alternatives. While the people making big money don't blink at those numbers, it's a little steep for those who are just starting out in internet marketing.
• Ignore Social Media Marketing - This is what most internet marketers seem to be doing. Or they just do a very bad job of it. Submitting your article to a few social networking sites and getting 10 votes on your story is useless. Sure, you'll get a link, but the search engines are smart enough to calculate the internal link strength on the social network pointing to your article and will conclude that the link shouldn't be very strong. Worse yet, if the search engines look at the 100 sites that you spammed your bookmarks to with an automated tool and link that up to your profile that shows you're just self submitting, you could be in for the dreaded "Google Slap." Google warned everyone about this last year, so it's only a matter of time before they go after the social link spammers the same way they did the paid linkers. One wonders if there is a blackhat technique that could be based on submitting your competition's sites in a spammy fashion -- all the more reason that you can't just ignore social networking.
• Pick the Middle Ground - You don't have to duke it out with the "Big Boys" in social media to be a success. As we've explained several times before, there is a ton of value to be had from having moderately popular stories. On Digg, the line seems to be around 50 Diggs. Other sites will vary, but the key is that your submissions get enough votes so that while they may not make the front page, they collect enough internal links from powerful profiles that the search engines conclude that the story page is important. If it's a "dofollow" site like Digg, so much the better. But even if you aren't getting SEO value from the links, having the social media link appear in the SERPs is a very good thing. First, what do you think a user is likely to do once they visit that page? Yep, click on your link. And if that page is taking up space in the top of the SERPS, it's a position that your competition doesn't get. A competitor that was comfortably sitting at #2 can find themselves pushed off the first page with well supported social media pages.

Your key in pursuing this middle ground strategy obviously is to find ways to efficiently gather a lot of votes for your stories without it taking over your life. Our PMS Social Suite, while it is certainly powerful enough to get you to the front page (and it's what some professionals use for just that!), it's real value is in allowing you to spend just 10 minutes a day to build a powerful profile that can get you into the sweet spot on Digg.

But there's another way to hit that sweet spot, and it works on every social network, not just Digg. If you've wondered why our blogging frequency has gone down as of late, the reason is that we've been feverishly working on a new product. We're almost done and getting ready for beta testing. It's going to be free, it will completely rock your world, and you should stay tuned.

When you get past all the slick used car salesman drivel over at the Warrior Forum, once in a while you can find some real gems.

Go read that post. The strategy is pretty simple, but it illustrates how you can use automation to save yourself a lot of time and still use social media the way it was meant to be used. There aren't any scripts or anything even remotely unethical going on, yet he shows how to generate a lot of backlinks with very little work.

Now if only I could find a tool that would read an rss feed and create a bookmark file consisting of all of the items in the feed. You could point it at your blog and presto you'd have bookmarks for every article. Or you could point it at your rss feed of your digg votes. Or your stumbles. Then whenever you dugg or stumbled something you'd be adding extra bookmarks across a couple of services with very little work.

Anyone know of such a tool? Or is that something we should write?

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

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

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

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

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

Do you spend your days in the drudgery of promoting your web sites? We've listed over 2,000 Social Media Websites as ripe grounds for promoting your articles. But the comment that we seemed to get the most was best summed up by katfrench on Sphinn:

"Seriously, though, post a list of two thousand social bookmarking sites and Sphinners will get a headache at the thought of all the time it would take to register.""

Why You Shouldn't Try to Submit to 2,000 Social Networks

• You Shouldn't Submit Your Own Stuff. I agree that there's nothing morally wrong with promoting yourself, but most of the communities out there will tend to vote you down if you just blow your own horn. It is far better to have a variety of people submitting your articles to the social networks, if only because then you've got a wide range of IP addresses submitting your articles. And let's not forget that Google was making noises earlier this year about devaluing links from social networks where it appears that the owner of the site is linking to their own pages.
• It's a poor use of your time. How much are you willing to pay for links? How much is your time worth? It's a matter of looking at your investment of time and how much a link or traffic is worth to you. If you decide a link from a third tier social network is only worth about a nickel and it takes one minute to submit the article, you're saying your labor is only worth $3/hour to do this yourself. If you live in the US, you can't live on that.

Why You Should be on as Many Social Networks as Possible

This sounds like a contradiction with the first section, but it really isn't. There are a lot of very good reasons that you should be on as many social networks as possible, instead of just focussing on the first tier like Digg, Reddit, Del.icio.us, etc.

• Cover Your Bets. What if you had spent hundreds of hours building up your site on Digg and they decided to ban you? Or what if Google's solution to the social nework self linking problem is to just dramatically discount all links from Digg? Concentrating on just a few social networks is really putting all of your eggs in one basket. It's dangerous and foolhardy. You should spread your risk across as many platforms as you can.
• Little Guys Bring Better Traffic. Yes, StumbleUpon and Digg can bring massive traffic, but the bounce rate is also astromical. Is it really worth paying for the bandwidth to bring in 100K visitors that spend an average of 15 seconds on your site? Who aren't really interested in what you have to sell? On the other hand, getting 5-10 good targeted visitors from a specialty site can lead to a conversion rate that will make it worth your while. It's just a question of whether you want to be able to brag about how much traffic you have, or whether you want to make money because you've got real visitors that are interested in what you have to sell or will click your ads.
• Little Guys Have Less Distance to the Top. Your submission on Digg will end up several levels away from the top page with the big PR boost. Even if it makes it hot, it will fall off and the long term link juice gained will be fairly minor. But on a small social site, your submissions will be fairly near the top. Would you rather be 10 steps away from a PR 9 page, or two steps from a PR 4? My gut tells me hitting singles all the time is better than hitting home runs but batting .050.
• Little Guys Aren't Filled With Jerks. There's no "bury brigade" on the small sites. The editors of the sites are pleased to have people submitting stories, as a lot of them end up seeding their own stories
• The Link Math is Astonishing If you concentrate on the top 3, you can at most get away with submitting 3 articles a day across them. And you'll have to bury that within many others each day so you don't look like you're only self promoting. 3/day = 15/week = 750/year. So for a year's worth of work you'll get 750 links, and if you're lucky they'll have an average PR of 1. That's not going to do much for you. Now what if you targeted 400 sites? The math now works out to 400/day = 2,000/week = 100,000/year. Now we're talking.

So Build a Bot, Right?

Wrong! Even if you could code a bot that would handle submissions on 400 different sites, it just wouldn't work.

• It's from the same IP address. Editors tend not to like bots (imagine that!), and your bot is coming from either a single or a small group of IP addresses if you use a proxy. Banning your IP is pretty darn easy. That's a big investment in development that you would make and it would be gone.
• It's from the same people. Unless you also maintained a huge stable of fake accounts on each of these sites (which would also have the same IP problem), your submissions would all be coming from the same people and could be easily banned.
• These sites change. There are several "auto-posters" that have been defeated merely by adding a little bit of javascript to the login. The bot's Curl script can't deal with that, so they cough. Just moving things around the page or changing the names of input fields is enough to make maintenance of your huge catalog of bot scripts impossible. You'd need a full time staff just to keep up with it.
• Captchas. Most of these sites are moving to some sort of Captcha on their submission, so unless you're an elite hacker it's not going to work. If Captcha's aren't a problem for you, then you don't need to be reading this.
• It Would Violate the TOS. Not that the bot spammers care, but most of these sites say you can't use a bot on them.

So What's the Solution?

The solution is the same one that worked the first time someone started a business: leverage the work of other people. All you have to do is get other people to post your stuff.

How to get them to do that and still maintain profitability is a lot less obvious. But you'll have to wait for tomorrow's post to find that out.

I've been having a right proper geek fest with Excel, PivotTables, and the output from our Social Heartbeat Monitor of 2,000+ Social Networking and Social Bookmarking sites.

Actually, that was hard to type as my hands are kind of cramping up.

I'm still pondering what this all means, and it'll get a lot more interesting when we start having week-on-week data. But here are some interesting graphs....

PageRank and Live Count

As you may recall, we looked at over 2,000 sites and found the ones that were "live" - they loaded, they at least looked like they were having some social activity, etc.

So here is the total pagerank distribution - and it's interesting to me how many middle pagerank (if you can call a PR5 middle!) social sites there are.

But this is only interesting to the point where you can see what is live.   Remeber that not-live includes stuff that does not load, linkfarms, obviously dead sites, etc, etc.

So, fear not, fifteen seconds with my trusty Excel and you get:

Quite a spread - you are much more likely to have non-live sites towards the bottom, but can you imagine a PR9 site that is linkbait or a personal blog or something?

Actually, it was half.com, which used to (if you're old enough to remember) have all sorts of things not related to selling and buying. Thanks, Meg, for all the fish.

I Feel The Need for Speed

Quick explanation: pageload is the time it takes to load the home page of a site from our server in lovely cari.net. I rounded all the times to the nearest whole number so 1 second is really 0.5 through 1.49. It is a relative measure, so that should be fine.

And what we see is, well, it's all ove the board, but can you imagine a 7 second load on a PR10 website? That was the Annotea project at w3.org. A-freaking-mazing.

Sad Sad Man

Yes, I am, and it is because I love stuff like this.

What interesting stuff are you guys pulling out of this? We've had scores of downloads - many more than we thought for something so, so, so of interest to SEO type people. (And thanks for all the kind emails!)

It's always great to get a new tool like the Social Heartbeat Monitor ™ and I always appreciate an article explaining why someone built it.

But that is often all you get. I have to admit, I rarely read detailed instructions, so I'm a bit reluctant to, you know, write 'em.

How It Works

The Social Heartbeat Monitor ™ page has a a pretty traditional advanced search form built around a grid. And since most of the people here are going to be search professionals, I am very much going to continue to resist explaining how to use an advanced search form, but below I have covered the search, status, and filter options so that it is all a bit more clear.

Search Options

The search options are the normal and useful ones:

• Name
• URL
• Domain
• Description
• Page Title
• Meta Description
• Meta Keywords

The "domain" variable is the stripped down url, so "http://promote-my-site.com" becomes "promote-my-site.com" - which is handy for deduplicating our list against the one you use.

It is also useful for using "%.br" to find all the Brazillian domains. The url is what we were able to make load in our browser: "http://www.myfunkysite.com" loads but "http://myfunkysite.com" does not.

Status Options

These are pretty simple:

• Live - site is what you think it is - pligg or scuttle or myspace/facebook clone and you can login, post, etc
• Dead - does not resolve, throws error pages >5 days a month, etc
• TBD - have not had time to look at it yet
• Waiting - waiting on a response to test the site
• Zombie - site resolves to a link farm, or it loads but does not work reliably enough to be "live"

I'm sure someone from Gartner could come up with more expensive names, but those should be pretty clear.

Filter Options

And the filter options (equals, min, max) are:

• Page Rank (PR)
• Google Backlinks
• Yahoo Backlinks
• MSN Backlinks
• Pages Indexed by Google
• Pages Indexed by Yahoo
• Pages Indexed by MSN
• Name in Google
• Name in Yahoo
• Name in MSN
• Load time

I think the only things here that require explanation are:

• Name in Google/Yahoo/MSN - How many times does "VOIPigg" show up in each search engine. Think of this as a rough (very) strength indicator.
• Load time: how long to load the home page from our server. Yes, yes, I know that this isn't perfect, but it gives you a rough order of magnitude (ROM) for how fast/slow a site is. The range for live sites is from almost 10 seconds from Alexadigger to four tenths of a second (0.04) for eZine Writer.

All of the search and filter terms are available as columns in the grid. Obviously.

Downloads

Now, rather than swearing at google docs, you can download the whole list as a csv and filter away in Excel. Heck, if you're a glutton you could even put it back into your google docs and hum the Heintz Ketchup "anticipation" song if you want.

You do to register first to download. Why? So you can have the option to be notified when the list changes. Or when you next want to download the list you can get only the stuff that has changed. Handy, we think, and worth a quick and painless regsitration.

Feedback

Please do give us your feedback of the features and functionality. Things that seem obvious to us but not to our beta testers have pretty much been eradicated, but each time we release a new tool and thousands of people come bang on it we find they've done stuff we did not anticipate.

We already caught the problem when someone puts "-0.5" in the PR field, but what else will people come up with?

Enjoy!

And remember, since the Social Heartbeat Monitor ™ is fully ad supported freeware, you can count on it sticking around. We have around a hundred updates to the list but wanted to wait to get it into this new form before putting them in.

We're taking down the downloadable list of 2,162 social bookmarking and networking sites and replacing it with an interactive analytical tool that gives you a lot more information and display control. It will let you see the heartbeat for any social bookmarking or networking site. Thus, in a fit of imagination, we called this the Social Heartbeat Monitor ™.

(Plus it is much much cooler than a google doc and you can get the list directly as a "csv" file.)

Things you can find out

We've built some controls around a grid so that you can filter the list of 2,000 plus social bookmarking and social networking sites down into the sublist you're probably most interested in. By my watch it is between 30% to 70% faster than google docs. (Attention google: my technical staff is better than yours!)

We added the kinds of controls that will help you find something specific:

• You want PR5 or better Live Sites? No problem, there are 534 of them.
• Sites that are live but between PR2 and PR4 with >1,000 pages indexed in google? 403 of them.
• Insert your question here....

But most importantly, we introduced the idea of a heartbeat for each site.

Heartbeat?

It's great to have a big list, and it's even handy to have a "Live" indicator so that you know that sometime in the last two months I was able to use the site in an appropriate fashion (create user, login, post). But we're including what we call heartbeat information:

• Pages indexed in Yahoo/MSN and what-is-their-name, oh, yeah, Google
• Backlink count for Yahoo/MSN/Google
• Load time

We'll be keeping this information on a weekly basis for each site so that you can track a site over time. And, because we really believe in making this information widely useful, you'll be able to download the performance over time.

Made for Custom Analysis

For example, Mixx is getting huge buzz right now in the SEO community and has 133K pages indexed in google. Does anyone (outside Mixx) have any idea what that was last week? You'll know in a week if you come back.

To put it even more in perspective, Digg has 9.8M pages indexed and Dogster has 134K pages. Dogster? Yep, it's exactly what you think it is. But both Dogster and Mixx are PR6 sites with similar google love. Where should you be putting your funny dog stories? (Trick question, the answer is both digg and dogster, wtih mixx in third place if you have time!)

Do you find that your stories do better on PR4 sites or PR8 sites? Do you want traffic or links? Now you have to consider.....

Tribal Knowledge vs. Experimentation

Well, we know all about long tail search and long tail e-tailing and long tail PPC campaigns, etc, etc. And there are even a few of us talking about niche sites versus huge volume general sites (ex: Digg vs. VOIPigg) but you know, it's all been logic, supposition, and educated guesses.

At Promote-My-Site we've written about getting a diversified portfolio of social bookmarking and social networking sites. So we started thinking about analyzing sites - how many backlinks, what is their PageRank, what is the change over time, etc. It's all obvious stuff to want to know, but except for traffic share changes for the "big 10" you can't really get any of that. For free anyway. And you certainly won't get that easily downloadable.

No longer. Now you can experiment using our Social Heartbeat Monitor ™. Find sites that are in your specialty, look at smaller but still high value sites (there are a ton), re-post some of your greatest hits. Once you find a combination that works and gives you good ROI, find more sites like it using our filters.

Calling All New Sites

We spend an astounding number of hours pulling lists from the internet and came up with 2,000 to look at. Yesterday I got emails about three new ones. We'll be constantly adding things to the list and we'll give you a way to find "what's new." You can also easily suggest new sites right from the Social Heartbeat Monitor ™ page.

Time Will Tell

We believe that a social bookmark and network heartbeat will be a valuable tool for looking at the change over time of a social networking or social bookmarking site. We think you'll enjoy it and find it useful to build a portfolio of performing social network and bookmarking sites.

In one of this week's hottest Sphinn stories, Google to punish pagerank for Digg stories, it is clear that people are really focused on the readers, links, and prestige of Digg and the other top-tier social networking and social bookmarking sties.

Which is fine but the level of upset makes it clear that a lot of people don't have any real diversified portfolio of links and readership. Nothing wrong with making buggy whips, but you gotta watch out for changes in consumer taste.

Let's take a look at what Google (supposedly, it was taken down) said:

We are working on strategies to level the playing field, effectively bringing back natural search patterns enjoyed in the pre-social bookmarking days. For webmasters who use social media responsibly, this is nothing to worry about - we will be targeting mainly a small minority of prolific bookmarkers with a new algorithm that looks at linking patterns over time.

Webmasters who rely heavily on bookmarking their own sites to gain traffic will likely see a drop in pagerank before the end of 2008, and we will be working closely with two major social bookmarking sites to find a solution that will have no detrimental effect on the average internet user.

Let me translate from google-ish

• "level the playing field" means: Make more money over here and get our stock back up from 430 to $700+.
• "pre social bookmarking" means: We used to be able to control what was hot, not Digg
• "use social media responsibly" means: Guess what we mean else we'll make your website disappear
• "new algorithm" means: Anuj and Prakash are going to be busy in Bangalore
• "will likely see a drop in pagerank" means: Let the rending and wailing begin

What will be the most interesting to me will be to see if breaking cover and running to cover your tracks is better than just freezing until the predator flies over.

The Key Phrase Is....

Kind of buried at the end: "we will be working closely with two major social bookmarking sites." Two. Let me repeat: Two. We took all the lists that we could find on the internet and spent months combing through all 2,162 Social Networking and Social Bookmarking sites to see who was alive and who was dead. (And, yes, you can download the list at that link!) We currently have a sublist of over 400 sites where you can create a login, actually login, and post a bookmark or story.

Automation

Really, you're going to need to automate some of your manual habits if you branch out from the tippy top tier players. We've reviewed a lot of the social networking automation options out there for you. It's not really going to be fun - life is easier if you use one or two sites rather than a dozen or more. But if people were using multiple sites then there'd less hyperventilating about this vague but important threat from google.

And if your (natural) competitors are going to have a problem, then that is really signaling an opportunity for you, isn't it?

Bear Stearns Closes at 30

And sells the next day at 2. Bam! Billions of shareholder equity lost. A year ago this would have been unimaginable.

Let's have a though experiment.... Eccentric Saudi Prince buys Digg for $750M, bans all content not involving funny Kitty Pix, Digg'ers flee to Mixx, Prince shuts down site in a huff.

What if all your links were from Digg? Or if all your readers were from Digg? Or if all your reputation in the social media world were resident in Digg.

Oops.

Do Nothing

Two words: Buggy Whip.

If you just keep on using one or two sites and your competitors diversify, then you will lose in the SERPS, all other things being equal. They will have a more diversified and stable reputation base, get readers who never see your stuff, etc.

Find the Niche Sites

Let's say you were in the Voice Over IP (VOIP) business and you were writing content around decision making, technology, standards, all that jazz. Which do you think would be better - digg or Voipigg? Who? Voipigg. It's a niche pligg site with good content control. Low volume, like most niche sites, but the 100 or so people who show up regularly are all looking for VOIP related stories.

It takes the exact same amount of time to submit both sites, so obviously digg is a better use of your time.

Think Risk Aversity

Really? Think about what started this whole discussion - threat of wholesale stripping of pagerank for heavy Digg users.

I think the mindset of "only have time for one" is a false dichotomy and that in today's competitive environment you have to make the time to develop and implment a diversified social networking strategy.

[Ok, read this post, it's a doozy, but before you go download this list, you should check out our new Social Heartbeat Monitor . Look left. Yep, there it is. You might also want to read this article on why we built it to replace the file discussed here.]

About six months ago we started looking at social networks. Not just the top tier sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, etc, but the second and third tiers as well. There are a truly huge number of social network sites out there. Almost every niche has at least one if not many sites devoted to it.

For example, take Memeza. It's a Pligg site for Zambian news. You might think that's pretty small and insignificant, but if you've got a story that would be of interest to Zambians it only takes 2 votes to get to the top page.

It's PR 4. Think of how that might be useful.

A lot of Sites Out There

There seem to be lots of different lists of of social network sites. The lists usually have numbers of sites in double digits. We've scoured the web for everything we could find. Every time we found an article along the lines of "Here are 18 social networking sites you should know about" we added those sites to our list.

We've researched 2,162 social nework sites. Here's how they break down:

A Present For You

We've put the entire list up on Google Docs as the Promote My Site Social Network and Bookmark MegaList V18. Here's a snapshot of the first few rows to entice you to go download the document.

More than just a list of names of social network sites, we've also included the URL and Domain so you can dedupe it against your own lists, as well as a status as of last week and our comments. If we get enough interest we'll put together an application so that people can query the database.

We thought about making this premium content, but compared to the stuff we're working on for premium, a raw list of social networking sites just doesn't cut it. We hope you'll keep an eye on us for when we start releasing the premium tools.

[Remember, check out our new Social Heartbeat Monitor. and this article to explain why we built it.]