Can You Digg It?

Earlier this week Raquel blogged about an extremely useful graphic that explains where you can get the most bang for your buck with social media. For the most part, there are no real surprises here. I already frequent the social media platforms that this graphic describes as particularly useful from a marketing perspective. Well, that’s not entirely true. There was one site that comes off smelling like a rose, and I spend almost no time there: Digg.

Digg has always been kind of a mystery to me. Sure the concept is simple enough. Everybody can give any page on the Internet a thumbs up. The pages that get a lot of thumbs up (referred to as being “dug”) are shown on the Digg home page. Those lucky pages get a massive surge of web traffic for a few days, crashing their previously obscure websites and driving their web hosting providers nuts.

Some very small percentage of the visitors from Digg stick around after the traffic spike, but for the most part they were just one-time visitors. I guess there’s a certain appeal to doing something like that, but I never viewed it as something to build a marketing strategy around. The social media graphic mentioned above, though, made me start to wonder.

Then I saw an article in Mashable talking about the new changes that Digg CEO Jay Adelson recently announced. Now there are a lot of changes discussed here. Integrating with Facebook and Twitter accounts is big. I think creating the means for a website owner to publish Digg comments right on their page sounds fascinating. But there was another change that really caught my eye.

It sounds like Digg is gravitating toward creating more niche communities of Digg users. Digg has some very broad categories, but nothing that could reasonably be described as niche. I love playing World of Warcraft. I don’t play other online role-playing games. I don’t even play many other computer games at all. I don’t own a traditional video game console. As I’m writing this the top dug page under the Gaming category is about Battlefield: Bad Company 2. I couldn’t care less. If I drill down to Gaming > PC Games the top site is another (different) page about Battlefield: Bad Company 2. I’m not even a little engaged in what’s going on here.

Now imagine that there was a category on Digg that was dedicated to World of Warcraft. Well, I would definitely be interested in the #1 page there. I’d also be interested in the second and third pages. In fact I could probably easily lose an hour checking out all the World of Warcraft pages that had been dug.

As a marketer this is exciting. Digg is embracing the long tail. I’ll be honest. I don’t know how to market a product or service to everyone on the Internet. That’s just too big of a group for me to get my arms around. What I can get a good, solid handle on is marketing to targeted groups of people with some similar interests.

And it sounds like that’s exactly what Digg is going to turn into over the next few months.