We recently had a Digg submission go Hot. This is the first one that I was personally involved with. Given that I didn’t have anything better to do on a Sunday afternoon, I thought that it might be fun to Chart the # of Diggs and resulting traffic to see if we could draw any interesting conclusions.

Here is what I saw…

A friend submitted the Digg article. It got a few Diggs however I didn’t really pay too much attention. I knew that it was really good content but I didn’t want to get my hopes up.

photo © Darren Hester for openphoto.net

Google SiteMatch Ads

If you’re not using Google SiteMatch Ads as part of you Pay Per Click campaign yet, you may be missing out on a significant amount of high quality, targeted, and most importantly, low cost traffic. Assuming you know your niche and industry like the back of your hand, using the SiteMatch or Placement Targeting options in Google Adwords can help gain great Brand Visibility and Goal Conversions for your website or online service.

Its true … some of Digg’s functionality appears broken at the moment. Fortunately, its not critical functionality, so we will survive. It is a pain however.

Accordingly, in the remainder of this post, I’ll identify the problem, show the symptoms, discuss the implications, and propose a solution … much like an old boss said to me once; “don’t come to me with problems, come to me with solutions!”. I still live by that motto to this day!

To answer the question "why should I use Twitter / Facebook / Flickr / Digg / Sphinn / Jaiku / <insert Web 2.0-ish site>?" you have to rephrase it:

Why should I settle for less attention?

Having a blog is just the start.

"Your" audience isn’t hanging on to your every word: they’re leading their own online lives.

The only way to catch their attention is to be where they are.

The more places you and your audience share, the more of their attention you have.

It’s the participation economy, stupid!

I am really pleased to announce that we here at SEP are launching our First Annual Search and Social Media Jokes Contest, beginning today, and ending December 15, 2007. After all the fun and success we had with our first contest (the SEO Lyrics Contest), how could we not follow up with another?

I came across the Neilson Net Ratings for the top U.S. social networking sites. It shows that MySpace had 49.5 million unique visitors in October 2007, growing 19 percent over October 2006. While their growth percentage lags behind Facebook’s 125% and LinkedIn’s 189%, MySpace is still the giant, with an 80% overall market share.

This week I look at MySpace, by the numbers:

The Beginning:

An image can comfortably replace text we rather not expose directly to Google.

If a review requires disclosure and you want to avoid the Wrath of Google, maybe putting “sponsored review” in an image is so much smarter.

Or not.

Google & Image Spam

01:22: “Dreaded image spam. These embedded images not only cost you time, but they hog memory and clock bandwidth. They’re also tough to catch.

But not for us… Optical Character Recognition from Google Book Search helps us block image spam before it gets to you.”

As anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock is well aware, tomorrow is Black Friday, which isn’t nearly as dire it sounds.

“Black Friday” actually refers to the day on the books when the ink turns black (positive).

With that in mind, one can’t help but have visions of cash registers dancing in their head. This, of course, has ramifications for marketers in general, be they online or offline or any mix of the two.

There are tricks of the trade and tips and all sorts of advice that can be proferred up, but call me Scrooge — I ain’t sharing.