Digg’s $300m Mistake? - Reputation Management

I love social media, but I also have a bit of a passion for reputation management that I’ve never really explored or shared online. It’s a bit of a shame that there’s no hugely popular sole focused reputation management blogs online and I probably won’t be the first (unless Andy counts) so there’s certainly a risk. Reading quicksprout recently I decided to ‘roll the dice‘ and start sharing a side of Search Engine Marketing / Social Media that I don’t think gets covered enough and it’s something I believe I can do in a unique way whilst still connecting with readers. Starting with this post.

With pretty much everyone from Valleywag to TechCrunch talking about Digg’s $300m price tag (which may or may not be true but recent site changes to increase pageviews make me a believer) I started wondering why this huge, popular website wasn’t snapped up straight away.

Digg Doesn’t Listen to It’s Users

Firstly we have fair, and open requests from one of it’s top submitters. An Open Letter to Kevin Rose

• Domains clearly being on some sort of auto-bury
• Kevin Rose has a 101% popular stories ratio
• Get in touch with the top submitters and thank them

The auto-bury feature was talked about in lots of places, simply because if it’s true (which it certainly seems) then it’s pointless people wasting their time to submit the story from a certain website if there’s no chance it can make the homepage of the site.

One of the reasons that people are talking about digg negatively on these blogs is that digg has no support and people have to come up with their own conclusions. I can’t count how many times I’ve read people say ‘digg never replied’, now I’m sure they get a lot of emails but this was the same over a year ago, at least give some textbook response.

Active Submitters are Being Banned

As Tamar rightly stated, active submitters are critical to Digg’s success and giving most of them no reason to their ban certainly doesn’t help the matter. When you’ve spent tens if not hundreds of hours on a website for your account just to disappear (and without reason), people are going to:

• Talk about it on their own websites
• Try to spread the word to other Digg users
• Stop using the site and move elsewhere

Its Come to Bite them in the Ass

If Digg are looking for a sale; it’s not working. This is for a number of reasons, the site revolves too much around Kevin Rose for the likes of Diggnation, they have had no system to get in touch with their users or at least give decent feedback to things that are being said about them online and now there’s plenty of people talking about why they shouldn’t be bought.

Now if only they had someone to monitor this for them from the start, Digg would be a much better place today.

Update: This is a start, but not nearly enough.

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