Digg PR

Digg.com is an online news portal where the editor is you. Well to be precise you and, according to Richard MacManus's striking statistics , 445,000 other registered users. By 'digging' a news article on any range of subject matter, a feature which is readily available on most web savvy sites (haven't added it to mine yet!), you can create the headlines for the day.



The reckoned demographic of active 'diggers' is, According to Digg's advertising partner Federated Media; "Audience: Business and IT influencers working in technology.* 94% male * 88% 18-39 * 64% HHI above $75k * 52% IT professionals, developers or engineers * 26% managers or above * 39% publish their own blog"

However, again according to Richard, only 2,287 users contributed any stories to the site during the last six weeks. With the top 100 users contributing fully to 55% of the stories that appeared on the site's front page, and the top 10 users - yep, you can count 'them on your own two hands - contributed a whopping 30% of the front page stories. Peer production? I think a better term for it would be 'peerage production' (Mashable).

So how could this benefit us online marketers. Well if you haven't got it yet this is a great online PR tool that is lets just say open to influence. Working with a large global company like JWT, that sits within the ever growing WPP Group, I have a lot of colleagues direct and in-direct. But we all want great PR for our clients and with a little helping hand from your friends you can make the headlines with ease. Got a PR peice, post it on Digg, send a blanket email with the URL asking for some digging (it will only take them a second) and hey presto you have started the ball rolling for the diggosphere to pick it up.

To give you an idea into the relative ease this can be done Apple posted an article on a scholarship program that recieved 1311 Diggs and recieved as a result 30,000+ views. So get digging. It may even be worth setting up an email group specifically for this purpose. But being a digital environmentalist (not wanting to be the parasite that kills the host that kills the parasite) we should always look to be interesting and informative otherwise there will be no Digg and we lose a tool!



If you really get into Digg there are tools that allow you to really get to grips with the 'diggosystem' namely Mashable's Dugg Analyzer which gives you some pretty cool stats about Digg put into a graph where you can look at data over time. The tool also shows the frequency data of dugg items based on several variables, taking a top-down approach. Study larger trends based on a particular Digg category, and break it down further into topic, username, story title and even where the original story is hosted. You can see the frequency by day, week or month. The chart options include getting data on the number of stories, average diggs and total diggs. You can also get graphs on submission time and duplicate links, in addition to the other variables listed. For all of you that would like to see, graphically, how Digg items and activity play out, this application is for you. There are not yet options for the comparison of all the multiple variables, but that addition would introduce a new level of digg analytics.