digg

I'm attending a panel right now about using social media to build an audience for your blog. It features Matt Browner Hamlin, the Online Director for the Mark Begich Senate Campaign (fomerly of the Dodd campaign and Students for a Free Tibet), Jason Rosenbaum of the Sentinel, Josh Nelson and Cheryl Contee.

Jason and Josh just are discussing best practices for getting content noticed on social news sites like Digg, Reddit, Buzzflash and Stumbleupon and they made an important point. It's very hard to get noticed by A-list bloggers or to break through the clutter on Daily Kos to get on the Recommended list or promoted to the front page. If you don't have solid connections to those bloggers already, trying to get them to link to you is not a great strategy to get noticed and build traffic (even if the audience of those blogs might seem like the most low-hanging fruit). While it may seem daunting to try to break into these social news communities, it can be a more efficient and successful strategy than trying to break through in the A-List blogs.

Other useful tips for using these site:

• Live or die by the headline. Most people try to convey their point and get people to click through to their article. That's a mistake. If you don't get on the front page, you are not going to get a lot of hits. So your goal in writing a headline should be to convince the reader to give you a vote.
• Be good community members. Don't just spam the site, but contribute other interesting articles not written by you.
• Engage the commenters. Just like on Daily Kos, you have to engage the community to build traffic and votes. And on sites like Digg, the number of comments can impact the algorithm and play a role in getting you on the front page.
• Have a small pool of allies - readers or cobloggers - to help jump-start your article with a few votes. It takes no time and on smaller sites like Buzzflash it can quickly help you get to the front page.

Mike Gravel may be the crazy grandfather in the Democratic presidential primary, but he's also a potential rallying point for a whole bunch of folks who voted Nader in 2000 and think Kucinich is a toothless joke. He's had some solid appearances lately - particularly on the Colbert Report and during the Democratic debate, where he was a jolt of energy in an otherwise soporific event. He's also already encountering some pushback from the mainstream media and politicos, who want to exclude him from future debates - an opportunity to make hay and consolidate a (very minor) grassroots uprising if ever there was one. In short, Gravel's got nothing to lose and a lot to gain, so his campaign isn't nearly as risk averse as those of the front runners. That makes him an interesting petri dish for testing new strategies, and his supporters are rising to the challenge.

Case in point is the use of Digg by Gravel supporters and Students for Gravel. Every single blog post on the Students for Gravel site has a "Digg" button. They're using it to increase Gravel's profile online, and it's probably going to work. Gravel is dominating the 2008 elections page on Digg, and some articles about the candidate are bubbling up to the front page of the site. It helps that the Digg community is somewhat contrarian/libertarian, and very much a culture of subcultures. Gravel, as an outspoken outsider against an unpopular war is a natural candidate for a place like Digg. It probably makes it easier to move Gravel stories up the queue, but it also potentially taps into a new supporter base.

Digg is in all the major newspapers this week because of the hex key drama. Lots of new folks will be visiting the site, and tooling around. Now, maybe they'll get introduced to Mike Gravel.