Every blog software plug-in and sharing widget out there has the Digg button in one of the top five spots.  And why not?  Digg is a great site for finding fun and interesting content and the links that make it to the home page of Digg receive major spikes in traffic.  As one of the top social media sites out there, who wouldn’t want the opportunity to make it big on Digg if only for a day?

However when it comes to business, the odds of your company getting a post to Digg’s home page that results in a ton of traffic to your site is pretty slim.  The odds that the traffic you receive is comprised of quality prospects that can be converted to leads are about as good as winning the lottery five times in a row…or the Cubs winning the World Series. (Next Year!)  That’s why doing anything more then adding the Digg button to your share widgets or occasionally posting some of your best content just isn’t worth it.

Why?

Digg is not meant for business.

First and foremost, as with the vast majority of the top social media sites out there, Digg is designed and intended for consumers during their personal time.  While many businesses try to jump into everything social media, promoting business content on Digg is very much the proverbial square peg in the round hole.  People come here to relax and find fun and interesting content outside of work.  Your customers are not here.  And if they are, they’re either off the clock or on a really boring conference call.

Your business content can’t compete.

As I write this now, the top content is a video called “Evil driver soaks kids at a bus stop. Facing Prosecution.”.  The title speaks for itself.  Another article is “How Most Women Pick Their Halloween Costume”.  The top two items in the “Top in All Topics” section are “Girlfriend found weird vids I made of her” and “Daily Show Destroys CNN For Fact-Checking SNL Instead of”, respectively.  You think your video or blog post can compete with any of those for attention and votes?  Good luck.

Lack of value by association.

You’ve just crafted the best article on helping your customers and prospects improve their revenues and cut costs. It’s professional and witty. If it were to be on Digg’s home page right now, it would probably be somewhere between “Airport scanner shows passengers naked” and “Monstrous footprints of the mysterious creatures”. So let’s say you somehow do get noticed by a prospect even after points 1 and 2. Do the items you’re surrounded by say “Take my content seriously when thinking about your business purchase.”? Doubt it.

I like and use Digg myself.  It’s a great site to read random articles as a work break but it is not worth our company spending any time trying to promote our content there.  I would argue that the same holds true for your company unless you’re a B2C company that has strong content in one of the Technology sections.  Other then that, it’s better to focus your efforts somewhere else.

Disagree? If your company has had a positive experience that we can learn from, please let us know.

Tags: business, Digg, Social Media

Posted by Scotton Oct.15, 2009@ 10:00 am

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 15th, 2009 at 10:00 am and is filed under B2B, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.