31 January 2008
Many services have appeared over the past year that offer to help websites gain traffic from social media sites such as Digg , StumbleUpon and Reddit .
Using services that guarantee you reach the Digg front page for $100 or even $40 if you look hard enough on certain webmaster forums is a huge risk.
If you are a large brand and get caught out using these services, the consequences can be extremely harmful.
Do you want to place your brand equity in the hands of somebody who Diggs stories for a living?
One of the main drawbacks to these services is that they often fail, not due to the lack of votes but because of the poor content on their systems.
The owners place such a strong focus on money that they allow advertisers to submit stories that are clearly spam and have no chance of making the Digg homepage, let alone staying there for more than a few minutes. This willingness to accept low quality stories means the systems are liable to come crashing down at any time.
Therefore, if you happen to be associated with the system when it gets "outed" your brand will be subjected to the same assumptions of distrust from web users. The best way to ensure social media success is to learn what people want to read on sites like Digg and StumbleUpon by becoming a user of these sites yourself.
Once you know what stories are being made popular every day go out and create more of the same. Build a core audience of tech savvy social bookmarking users and your content will eventually become popular.
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