Scoreboard Media Group, Internet Audience Development

Not since Brick Tamland killed a man with his trident in the Anchorman news team rumble has there been a battle implement so adept at stifling your enemy’s content.  This new trident…Diggblocking.

Listen.  I like Digg.  I use it a lot.  I play there a lot.  And I submitted enough good stuff to have one of the top accounts there until shelved my news-chasing, opened my front door, and reintroduced myself to the outside world.  This isn’t about getting over on Digg.  It’s just that Digg has some inherent flaws that competitive entities can take advantage of to cockblock their competitors.

If I am Joe Arbitrary Content Producer and Jane Arbitrary Content Producer is killing it on Digg, I have two choices:

1.  Bury her content and find about 10 of my other Digg friends to pile on their Buries.
2.  Mail a pipe bomb to her office.

Let’s face it, as much fun as both of those options are, the former is pretty easy for Digg to isolate the footprint and the latter may be illegal.  The smarter route is just to Diggblock her.

Fact:  Being a new user on Digg sucks.  You have no friends, nobody’s really looking out for your submissions, and you might only get 8 Diggs if you submitted the 11th Commandment as delivered to you that morning straight from God.

Fact:  If you blogged your breakfast conversation with God and then a top Digger submitted it, it would hit the frontpage (unless God was outed as a Ron Paul supporter).

Enter Diggblocking:

1.  Register some new Digg accounts (different IP’s, watch your cookie setting, randomize your usage…nothing new to SEO’s).
2.  Add your competitors’ sites to your RSS aggregator (or offshore this to some guy in India to stare at their sites all day).
3.  Begin submitting your competitors’ best content (with the worst titles you can think of) before anyone with any reputation at Digg can.
4.  Laugh.

The sound you just heard was our innocent, harder-working, superior-content-producing Jane throwing herself down the stairs.  I don’t condone this, but I do know it works and people are doing it.  So, while most of us won’t go on the offensive, it’s something you should be aware of in your content promotion methodology.

Notes:

1.  This works to a certain extent on the other big social news sites, but each of those sites have other features that still give the new guy a better shot.
2.  It took everything in me not to include a “Jane, you ignorant slut” mention.  (Ooops!)