Ok I’ve been carrying this post around in my head for a while and am I’m finally going to spill it, here are my tips on how to completely screw your competition in a web 2.0 social media world.
- Everyone who’s ever submitted a story to digg knows a snappy title can mean the difference between making the homepage and getting half a dozen votes and fading into oblivion. So when your competition publishes a new blog post, do them a favor and submit it on their behalf. Something with click poison all over it like ‘cool new idea’ or ‘Good post on www.example.com’ should do the trick
- Instead of taking a passive role you could always go with Captain Obvious. Get a disposable email, preferably something like competitiorname@hotmail.com, nothing says I’m a complete spammer like a hotmail address. A hyphen in there will never hurt. Then every time they submit a blog post make sure you submit it to digg or netscape. Make your title’s drip with web 1.0 usability like ‘click here for great travel deals’ or ‘I made 1.21 Million Last year on EBay with these tips’. Keep it up until you get your account banned and the URL banned as well
- Still not satisfied, go to your local library or internet cafe set up 15 or so accounts on the same IP and ‘self vote’ for stories from your competiton’s url
- Still haven’t them gotten banned yet, then make sure you email all of the top 100 digg users or get them in IM chats. Some of them will post the chat logs if you say the right things.
- Is there site still getting through then make sure you bury a story as soon as possible. Want to make sure you don’t miss one, link to an RSS feed for their URL so you know when something gets submitted. Send out a quick email or IM to 15 or so of your friends asking them to bury the story, that’s usually all it takes to make sure something never sees the light of day
- Are their stories still making it in set up another sock puppet account and narc on yourself. Tell them how the “person” owning your other account was supposed to pay you for digging their stories but you haven’t gotten the money yet and they won’t return your email. Ask tech support if they wouldn’t mind dropping them an email reminding them that they forgot to pay you.
The reason all of this works is that despite being a web 2.0 company Digg and Netscape are still in Spam 1.0 mentality. The biggest problem is Google has grown up the black operations spammers so much that they are sophisticated enough to make a web assassination look like spamming self suicide. Thats what happens when you act and react in planned and predictable ways. At this stage of the game Google is “smart enough” that they usually ignore or discount that type of thing realizing interpreting someone’s motives is a slippery slope. So how about it Digg, Netscape and all of you other social media sites, let’s lose this queen of hearts off with their head mentality, and realize the person you thought was guilty may have just been set up to take the fall.
PS: I’m sure someone is going to submit this story and as sure as the sun rises in the east it will get buried. Why … plain and simple it doesn’t agree with the “typical” digg users world view. Despite the fact that it’s true and making adjustments based on the information would be a wise choice, sadly it will go largely unnoticed.
Update:
Dugg and buried, not at all shocking, it’s a shame this information won’t get in front of people who could use it to fix digg and netscape.
Update II
Check out Lee’s post for this scenario put into action The hypocrisy of digg and spam
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