I'm not saying this has happened to you, but if you spend much time at all promoting your site in social media, eventually you're going to need a new ip address. Maybe the 20-something sysadmin was in a bad mood and was feeling the need for a power trip, or maybe you made a mistake and pushed the envelope just a little too far. But getting banned on most social networks means that they'll ban any further signups from your IP address.

Digg has an Odd Policy

This policy has really never made much sense to me. They've banned your account, so you've lost all the work you put into their site and the prestige you've built up. You'd think they'd just let you have a reset and say "Go forth and sin no more." But many sites, especially Digg, have the strange idea that if they ban your account, you're banned for life. You can never come back.

That's odd in Digg's case, because that's not what their TOS says. In fact, their TOS says nothing about multiple accounts at all. The closest anything on their site comes to saying this is in their FAQ:

To protect the integrity of the system, our policy is one person, one account. This is to help prevent users from artificially inflating Digg counters, which is explicitly against our Terms of Use.

So even the FAQ answer doesn't support their policy. As long as you have only one account, you're completely within the terms of the TOS and even their interpretation in the FAQ. Their claim that once you've been banned you can never come back just isn't supported in the agreement you made when you joined the site.

One also has to wonder how many thousands of people are cut off when one of these social sites demonstrates their lack of understanding of the architecture of the internet and heavy handedly bans an IP address for the router that stands between the internet and an entire Fortune 500 company or a university. If you're going through a firewall, it can appear that there are thousands of machines all with the same IP address.

Getting a New IP Address

Many people think their IP address is 192.168.0.1. Sorry, but that's a subnet reserved for local area networks. If you run "ipconfig /all" from a DOS prompt you'll see a number like that if you're behind a firewall. What you really want to know is the IP address of the device that the outside world sees. You can easily see this by going to http://whatismyip.com/. That's the address that the social networks see from you.

For most people, getting a new IP address consists of unplugging their connection to the internet and plugging it back in. Power cycling your DSL or Cable modem is usually enough to get a new DHCP assigned address. Very few people have real static IP addresses since that requires a special set up on the part of the ISP. What many people do run into is what Road Runner does: the IP address is stored on the cablemodem, so the modem keeps the same IP address between power cycles. There's an easy way around this.

With Road Runner, the cablemodem is storing the MAC address (Media Access Control) of the device connected to it on your side of the firewall. So if you've got the standard setup of PC -> Router -> CableModem, it's the MAC address of the router that the cablemodem is tracking. As long as the same device is connected, you can power cycle the cablemodem all day and the IP address is not going to change. So what you want to do is change the MAC address of the router. With a Linksys router, just go to setup -> MAC Address Clone and change one of the numbers. Click "Save Settings" and then power cycle your cablemodem. When it wakes back up, it will see a different device attached to it and it will require a new IP address on its site. Tada! New IP address for you. It's about a 5 minute operation.

At first glance you'd think changing the MAC Address would be dangerous, but it's not. The MAC address of your router is only being seen by the cablemodem. You don't have to worry about someone else on the internet duplicating your MAC Address because your cablemodem can't see anything but your router anyway. If you're really worried about this then you could always plug a different PC into the router and click "Clone My PC" and it will copy the MAC address from your PC to the router, but there's really no point. MAC address spoofing only takes place on the local network, so no harm done.

Clean Up After Yourself

Don't make the mistake of then immediately logging into the social network and creating a new account, because there's still a way they can spot you. You've still got the cookies in your browser from your last session, and in the case of Digg those are long term and point back to your previous id. If you don't want to lose all your cookies across all sites, then instead of clearing all cookies, in Firefox you can go to Tools -> Options -> Privacy -> Show Cookies. Scroll down to the name of the site and click "Remove Cookies".

Another thing to keep in mind are alliances, such as Digg and Facebook. Digg can't see your Facebook cookies (think about that, it would be a huge security violation of a browser allowed cross site cookie viewing), but if you click on a link to a Digg page from your Facebook account they'll see your Facebook id, and they know how to match that up with your previous Digg ids. I know someone that claims to have been busted that way, so just be aware.

I'm going to propose something rather radical. You should get rid of most of your friends on social media sites that you're targeting to promote your site.

We've talked about how you should stop shouting on Digg. But you can take it one step further. Most social media sites now discount the value of a vote from a friend. While they encouraged everybody to build up friend lists through the features of their sites, at the same time they devalued the votes on your submissions from your friends. The social sites can't make up their mind, but you can.

What if your account on a site such as Digg had just enough friends to have a footprint that looks reasonable, but mostly got votes from people completely unrelated to you? That would be the ultimate power user. So how do you go about doing that?

The "Normal" Digg Strategy

Most gurus will tell you that you should follow the strategy of friending the top users on a site and vote for their submissions. We've promoted that strategy quite a bit in these pages too. You get the attention of the top users by giving them vote love, and in return they'll start to vote for your submissions. This strategy works particularly well on Digg.

The problem is that it takes a few hundred votes to get to the first page if you're mainly getting support from friends, and there are only at best a few hundred users on Digg that understand how the game is played that will reciprocate. But once in a while a story hits the front page with < 100 votes. How can that happen?

In those cases, the stories are getting votes from such a wide variety of unrelated yet strong profiles that the algorithm flags them as hot. So your strategy should clearly be to get the attention of those top users, but without actually making them a friend on the site.

You could just create an account and start sending emails and IMs to the top 100 Diggers, but you'd get flicked away as a social flea since you haven't shown them any support. Unless you're someone everybody knows that strategy isn't going to work that well. But what if you could easily vote the submissions of the top 100 without ever friending them in the first place?

It's Staring You Right in the Face

One of the main reasons that people build a large friend list on Digg is that the site makes it very easy to view the queue of submissions of your friends. When MrBabyMan wants to "support his friends" (known to the rest of us as blind voting people he has "vetted"), he just goes to his friend's submission page, opens every link, and clicks the Digg button. Or perhaps he just loads the RSS feed of his friends submissions (see the little feed icon in the top right corner of the "all recent activity" tab on that page?) and votes them from a reader. If you want to be one of the people that he does that for, you need to start digging all his submissions until he notices you and makes you a friend. You'll also need to submit content that he feels that he can trust. Lather, rinse, repeat for the Top 100 Diggers and some percentage of them will friend you back and you'll have a stable of votes you can call upon when you're in need.

But you don't have to friend him to get his attention. There's also an RSS feed for his submissions page. Just load the rss feeds for the submissions of the top 100 Diggers into an rss reader and you'll have a steady stream of content that you should digg in order to get attention. And you didn't have to friend anyone!

Making This Easier

Since this is Promote My Site, we're obviously going to show you a technical solution to make this process easier. Instead of maintaining 100 different RSS feeds, you could just use the Yahoo Pipes mashup of the top 100 Diggers submissions. This pipe reads the SocialBlade Top 100 list to pull out the top diggers and then combines the feeds of all of their submissions into a single feed.

Instead of going through the pipe, you can just go directly to the RSS feed: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=qtyf1ery3RGVaDdodfQQIA&_render=rss. Yes, it takes a little bit of time to run, but you won't notice that if you're accessing it from your reader. And you'll always have a steady supply of articles from the Top 100 to Digg.

If you were smart you'd be jumping on those articles and digging and commenting on them as soon as they became available.

If you were really smart you'd consider posting the good ones to other social media. People often complain that a lot of what MrBabyMan submits is from Reddit, so turnabout is fair play, right?

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do as They Say, Not As They Do

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

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

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

Won't I Get Banned?

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

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

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

It's How You Use Your Tools That Count

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

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

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.

You should seriously consider effectively communicating with the people that follow you on Twitter.

There's a twitter account called RU4real that claims to be an experiment. Here's the only thing they've tweeted:

DO NOT FOLLOW THIS ACCOUNT. It is an experiment to see how many people read the pages of the people they follow. You are a tool.

The problem is that this experiment isn't proving anything other than that people out there are using things like TweetLater, an excellent utility that allows you to automatically follow anyone that follows you. You can send a nice little direct message to your new follower as well.

Most people seem to auto-respond with something along the lines of "Hi! Thanks for the follow. Look forward to seeing your tweets!" While that's certainly cordial of them, I think they're missing out on a great opportunity. Someone has contacted you with a follow, and you'll get their attention for 140 characters. Why not use an automated message along the lines of:

Thanks for the follow. Please consider http://feeds.feedburner.com/PromoteMySite for your reader, you'll enjoy it.

We've been using our Greasemonkey Twitter Script and over the last week Oliver and I have picked up about 800 new followers. Getting into even a small percentage of those follower's daily read can have long term benefits for your site. (Watch the twitter video on the Promote-My-Site YouTube channel)

The same tactic will work on other social networks as well. One of the nice features of our PMS Social Suite is that you can select everybody that recently became one of your fans and send them a shout. It's the "Welcome to being my fan" shout. Ask them to vote your favorites, point them at your blog, whatever. Just be sure to take advantage of taking part of the conversations that you're trying so hard to start.

Perhaps some of the people that are following ru4Real got there because they've been following a random strategy of following anybody and everybody. If they'd been using our Greasemonkey script, they would have unfriended ru4Real because they didn't become mutual. Their reward for the bad strategy of not using our script is to be "A Tool".

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.

Social Sites like Digg are like being in high school all over again.

You really have to keep that in mind when you're coming up with a strategy of how to promote your content on these networks. If you're just starting out, you're sitting with the geeks in the cafeteria, and the cool people aren't going to pay much attention to you. It will take a long time (at least in internet time) to carefully craft a reputation that will allow you to move in the popular (read that profitable) social circles.

There are lots of reasons to build up your friend networks. The primary one is that having a large network of friends will allow you to communicate to them and rally support for your submissions. You can put out the best content in the world, but if you're depending upon people to spot it as it scrolls off the upcoming page at 5 positions per second you're not going to get anywhere. Great content is just gas in the tank. You have to support that content with great promotion.

If you don't agree with the above statement, try finding a top digger that doesn't have a large netork of friends. Being at the top of a social network will bring you friends, but you can't get there without a critical mass of people to support your submissions.

Remember Google's murmurs about an impending slap this Fall for social network submissions that were purely self serving? If you're submitting your own blog to social networks just for the links and not getting much play from the community, you're going to be in trouble. Having a lot of friends is a defensive move against that impending slap -- being popular shows that your content is worthwhile and deserves authority. Again, great content without the votes to back it up won't be worth much.

Finally, even if you're submitting to social networks just for the links, think about the internal structures of these sites. If you've got 500 friends, that's 500 internal links to your profile page. And your profile page points to your articles. Sure, it may not be a lot of juice, but it'sa heck of a lot better than a profile page without any incoming links.

Time to Party

Joining in on the conversation on these sites is like going to a party. The only difference is that anyone with an internet connection can get an invitation to the party. If you're an internet marketer, the purpose of going to the party is to build up worthwhile relationships. It doesn't do you any good to spend time with people that can't or won't do anything for you. If you're just at the party to have fun and drink a few beers then you can just wander around aimlessly. But if you're attending the party to further your business, you need to have a strategy.

As you walk into the room, you'll see lots of different groups of people interacting. Let's take a look at some of those groups and how you might try to fit in.

The Kings and Queens Holding Court

Some groups consist of an individual surrounded by a lot of people listening to what they have to say. The communication is completely uni-directional. The King/Queen is doing all of the talking, and there is a large group of people listening to every word.

As Mel Brooks said, "It's good to be the King." And while the temptation to friend MrBabyMan and become one of his 10,111 fans (as of the minute that I'm writing this) can be quite strong, the fact is that he's only got 328 friends and you therefore have roughly a 3.2% chance of becoming a friend. Less than that because he's already got enough friends, and they're mostly other top diggers.

If you've come to the party to build up worthwhile relationships, there's not much the Kings and Queens are going to do for you. Perhaps someday when you've become royalty they'll deign to be your friend, but until then it's not a good use of your time.

The Wall Flowers

These are the people that are just hanging around and watching. They're not participating in any conversations -- their comment count is pretty close to zero. They may vote on things, but they don't have much of a friend network. They aren't very active either. Take a look at the date of their last submissions -- it's usually months ago. Spending your time approaching them is another waste.

Loudmouth Cheaters

These are people that have lots of friends and lots of fans. Check their profile and they've most likely added a bunch of friends lately. Their strategy is to churn and dump. They friend a lot of people, and when they get a mutual friendship back they vote for their friends submissions for a few weeks, then they drop the friend and turn them into a fan. Digg is especially bad about this because there's no notification that someone has dropped you. BTW, these people are often the ones sending 30 shouts every day, sometimes several duplicates at a time.

Avoid getting stuck in these groups by using a few guidelines. Don't friend someone back with a high number of both friends and fans with a recent history of adding a lot of friends. And never, ever friend someone back that has shouts turned off. There's nothing worse than the loudmouth that sends you 20 shouts a day and has the audacity to refuse to listen to shouts from their friends.

The Torch and Pitchfork Crowd

Most social networks have a few groups that have appointed themselves the network police. They ruthlessly seek out content that goes against their idea of what is good for the network and attack it. On Digg it's the Digg Mafia or Bury Brigade. Needless to say, there's nothing to be gained in getting involved with people like that. They aren't there for a mutual relationship, they're desparately trying to prop up their low self image.

You can spot these types of people from their comments. Try a site search in google for the name of the person and the word "spam." If they throw that term around a lot then they're probably a self appointed netcop and you'll want to avoid them.

Lively Small Groups

You can usually find a few small groups of people having lively discussions. They're active on the site, making lots of submissions and voting for each other's posts. They tend to have fairly large mutual friend counts. There's an implicit understanding that they'll vote for your submissions if you vote for theirs.

These can be great groups to find, but you have to be careful that you don't get dragged into a voting block. Social networks are on the lookout for this -- Digg discounts votes from people that vote as a block. So don't ever vote 100% for someone, and don't vote up questionable content. There's nothing easier for an admin to spot than a spam article with 20 votes. And when those same 20 people have all voted on several questionable submissions it's easy to mark them as a block.

OTOH, even a block can be useful. It's probably easier to get 500 votes from a voting block than 50 completely random votes. And the rumour is that Digg would count those the same. It's better if you don't get dragged into a block, but don't let it keep you up at night.

Secret Friends

These are groups of people that you can't spot other than to look at their voting behavior. They don't friend each other on the network, but they do communicate and vote each other's submissions up. It can be an innocuous as people that automatically vote for the posts of certain personalities on Sphinn, or as nefarious as someone with a huge rolodex of AIM addresses that works their list to drum up votes.

These can be great relationships to enter into, but it takes careful nurturing. You've become more than "network friends" -- you're becoming an actual friend.

Another way to approach these relationships is to tell a network friend "I'm going to drop you as a friend on the social network, but don't worry, I'll keep looking at your submissions while you're doing the same for me." My guess is that the social networks aren't really looking at the friend lists, but rather the voting blocks, so this approach can add a lot of paperwork without much benefit.

Robots

Yes Virginia, there are robots on social networks.

Here's hint for spotting robots: their profile picture is almost always an attractive young woman. Guess what? The actual number of "hot babes" cruising Digg pushing articles about video cards is pretty small.

You can also spot them through their voting patterns. Just find "people" that almost always vote for each others posts. The auto shoutback feature of the PMS Social Suite sort of works like that, except that you can include a lot of variables as to how you're going to operate and you can be picky about which shouts you'll listen to. But there are plenty of robots out there that you can establish a friendship with and reliably get your shouts Dugg if you use them correctly.

Tools for Figuring Out the Party

Spotting these groups at the party can be a pretty daunting task. You really don't have any choice other than to use an automated research tool such as the PMS Social Suite. Paging through the interface of a social network trying to spot these patterns is pretty hit an miss. If you're just a hobbyist, then you've got the time to burn. But if you're purporting to be a social network marketing professional, you need to use some real tools.

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.