There are many people providing social media marketing services. We do! But what you do not get with these services is paid diggs.

Your usual "deliverable" with a social media buy is a top class article, resource, widget or tool, that is attractive and compelling enough to draw votes and links naturally.

Now, obviously there is the temptation for anyone frustrated with their performance in the social media sites to cut out all this hard work and lack of guarantee. They want to buy a front page story and don't care how it is achieved.

Enter paid diggs.

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The word is out from the horse's mouth. Kevin Rose, founder of the ultra-popular Digg social media site, just posted that new algorithm changes have been put into place. Without actually coming out and saying it, it seems like he's saying these changes have been put into place to reduce the chances of being gamed (i.e., by SEOs/SMMs).

Now while it's probably noble that the intent is so that stories "go popular" if they garner a wide variety of votes, the net result seems to include some of the following problems:

1. Stories could require OVER 100 votes before they'll get on the home page, according to Rose himself.
2. Sites with already huge readership are less likely to be affected because they already have a more natural "diversity" of early votes.
3. New sites with small readerships have to try extra hard to become popular. The same type of article on an already popular site will always gain more votes. I've seen it time and again. Once you're popular, substandard articles can still do relatively well.
4. Friend networks - the whole essence of social media - are being discounted as a result.

Members have already been saying for over a year that they're disappointed with Digg, and I can't see how these algorithm changes are going to help. Top users are still being banned, and with no reasonable explanation, and good stories being buried without the submitter allowed to see by whom. That means competitors can easily bury you if they have a lot of hateful friends. (The level-headed sort might say that I'm being extreme, but sorry, I'm not.)

On the other hand, whichever company is supposedly ready to spend $300M (600M??) on Digg might be making such things a requirement. If that's the case, I predict a mass exodus of members to more niche voting sites. Er, well, another mass exodus.

Are you worried? Don't be. Here are some tips:

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As social media marketers, one of the most common questions we get about linkbaiting and social media promotion is this:

My niche is boring and / or non-technical - how do I turn it into something popular and linkable?

Last week I stumbled across a Wikipedia article that was, despite its dry (and boring) subject matter, doing quite well on Digg.

The article in question is this introductory piece on Montessori. You might want to take a few minutes to go through the article and figure out any angle that would make it interesting to the average Digg user. My best idea (and this was after reading the Digg link) was about how the Montessori system was a cover for brainwashing little children and sapping their creativity.

Paranoid delusions apart, I strongly doubt that my spin would have done better than this take:

Monetessori Method, the educational system of Google founders.

It is, for lack of a better term, f'n brilliant.

Instead of forcefully making a boring topic appear interesting, this digg user took something that would guarantee attention (Google founders) and related it to a quite uninteresting topic. The result is a Digg headline that probably got enough *blind diggs* to make it popular and it ended up getting 562 diggs (as of writing this article).

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