As you fully know, this week we launched the 2008 Web 2.0 Awards. Like last year and the year before, the awards were met with praise and kudos (good job, Jane and crew), and the page was submitted to Digg in hopes of making the home page. Jane and Rand sent out some tweets and commented on the blog post, urging various colleagues and users to digg the submission. Yesterday I saw the piece receive over 100 diggs in just 3 hours, so I fully expected the submission to go hot fairly quickly. When I woke up this morning, however, I checked and saw that, after 20 hours, the piece had only 200 diggs. What happened?

Well, I'm no Digg expert, but I've got at least one decent hunch. Take a look at the comments:




Of 17 comments, 7 directly reference either Jane, SEOmoz, or both. They typically consist of remarks like "Way to go, Jane & Mozzers!," "Jane Rox!," "great linkbait for SEOmoz," "Well done, Jane!," and other similar comments. I hope you see where I'm going with this...

For all of you who read the SEOmoz blog (or other SEO blogs) and have Digg accounts, it should be known that as Digg users, we SEOs are a vast, vast, vast minority. The general Digg population doesn't know who Jane Copland is or what SEOmoz is; thus, comments like "Great job, Jane!" and "Way to go, SEOmoz!" do nothing more than confuse the majority of Digg users who don't know who we are and who have little to no understanding of what SEO is.

Here's another comment from the fake Google onebox search results post Jane authored not too long ago (as you may recall, this post did hit the Digg homepage):



The original comment was clearly left by someone who is familiar with SEOmoz--he calls us "moz'ers." The response is from your average Joe Digger, who doesn't understand the reference and is confused by it. I've seen the same thing happen with submissions, too:



Here the submitter mentions "SEOmoz" in the title and "Rand Fishkin" in the description, and 95% of Digg users don't know who he is or likely care (sorry, Rand). The same goes for me:



Diggers don't know or care who I am. This isn't Sphinn, people. Digg has a much broader category and user base. You can't just treat it like a bigger Sphinn and expect millions of users to know what a "mozzer" is. Likewise, submissions like this are pretty much useless:



It may be hard to read, but someone submitted a post I wrote about the Werewolf/Search Spam party we hosted at Pubcon. Why on earth would this be news to anyone other than our niche industry of SEOs? This is not an appropriate story to try and promote on Digg. That's not to say that no SEO-related articles or stories ever make the home page--some do, but you have to think about the overall value of the piece. If it's general enough that a large amount of people outside of your industry would find it interesting, try submitting it to Digg. If not, stick with Sphinn (or other industry-appropriate forums/social media sites if you're promoting a non-SEO/SEM piece).

Let's go back to the Web 2.0 Awards submission comments. The actual awards are great--you know it, I know it, lots of us know it. But what does the average Digger see when he clicks on the submission and sees the comments? He sees a built-in community praising the author, SEOmoz, and talking about how this was great "linkbait." Most of you are fully aware of SEO's negative reputation, especially on Digg. Many stories that are SEO or SEM-centric or that are too marketing aggressive get buried pretty quickly because they're seen as spam. These comments all seem to come from a bunch of people who know each other and praise the successful "linkbait" (admittedly, a pretty spammy and negative-sounding term, even though we know that it's not necessarily the case) of the Web 2.0 Awards, so what's a Digger to think? I'd wager they say, "This is spam," hit the Bury button, and browse the rest of Digg. The bury not only hurts the story's chances of making it on the home page, it also isn't good for the submitter to be associated with what is perceived to be spammy content. The submitter's success ratio and reputation are compromised, driving him into a downward spiral of alcoholism and hard drugs (okay, maybe not, but it's still not good).

The fact of the matter is that Digg is an extremely large social news site, so the chances of the community knowing who you are or what your site is are extremely slim (obviously there are exceptions to the rule if you're, you know, famous, or if you operate an extremely generally well-known site). Digg isn't Sphinn. You can't submit a story about Danny Sullivan planning another SMX conference and expect it to instantly hit the home page like it would on Sphinn.

Maybe the Web 2.0 Awards submission will eventually hit the home page (though at this point it's looking pretty slim). Either way, the submission and its comments are a great example of "know your audience." Jane isn't your audience. Neither is Rand. Or me. Or SEOmoz members. Digg users are your audience, and you have to know what they like and don't like, what sense of humor they have, what pop culture references they'll get, and what industries they're tapped into. That's the tricky thing with social media marketing--you have to adapt your submissions, your tone, your pretty much everything in order to appeal with whichever demographic frequents that particular site. A good starting point is a post that Chris Winfield wrote at Search Engine Land about the art of commenting on social news sites, and it's definitely worth a look if you're aiming to participate more on social news sites and increase your profile visibility.  

Note that this isn't a gripe against Jane or Rand--they both did a great job with the Web 2.0 Awards. This post isn't even a personal attack on the SEOs/marketers who made the comments--I know that their intentions were good and that they're just trying to support us. However,  when dealing with social media marketing, it's imperative to do a little bit of research to know how to appropriately leverage various sites without seeming like a spammer.