Start Small

Many times when people think about getting publicity for their business, their wishlist goes something like this:

• I want to be featured in Forbes
• I want an interview in Inc Magazine
• I want to sit down with Donny Deutsch on the "Big Idea"

Having lofty goals is great, but it’s not always possible. Many times, it’s much more realistic (and effective) to start smaller. Think about all of the blogs that are out there. Find out which ones your potential customers read on a daily basis? Determine the ones that reporters for those bigger publications use (Who are they quoting? Who are they linking to online?). Start there. Most times, it will be easier to get featured on a smaller blog than a major publication. You can then use this coverage later on when you pitch bigger publications.

Hang Out In All The Right Places

Social media has made it so much easier to build relationships with people and get noticed. A great place to start for this is right on Twitter. Use one of the Twitter search engines or directories (I really like Twellow) to find reporters who are in your space. Simple searches – like this one for "reporter" — can be really helpful. Connect with them. See what types of things they are looking for. Become an invaluable resource to them.

When you have somewhat of a relationship built up, connect further through places like Facebook and LinkedIn. It’s all about building those relationships. Once you have a relationship with someone, they are much more likely to want to write about you or your company. But don’t forget, just like everyone always preaches good content, the same is true here. If your products or services aren’t really that good, you’re not going to get too far.

Traffic Is Noticed

Let’s say you’ve now built some relationships and received some initial press coverage. Promote that content just like you would promote something from your own site. Do you have strong accounts in social networks? Get it out in StumbleUpon. Get it on Digg. Share it with everyone. This will have a two-fold effect.

First, it will get more coverage for you. The more people who see it, the better.

Second, newspapers, magazines, TV stations and other media outlets are all thirsty for traffic. Many of them look very carefully at what articles are most viewed for the day (more views = more ad revenues). And many times this trickles down to the reporter. Do you think he or she would probably want to write about you again, if they got a big pat on the back from their boss? Of course they would….

Last week, my friend Chris Bennett at 97th Floor and his brother Patrick at Modern Blue launched a new analytics package called BLVD Status that I am particularly excited about. I was one of the original pre-beta testers and was able to see this grow into a really powerful and helpful tool for anyone trying to better track their search & social media marketing efforts.

BLVD Status is an analytics program that has a live dashboard similar to something you would see in Have a Mint, but with really robust information like conversions, search engine rankings, outgoing link information, and many more data points. BLVD Status presents a slick and clean user interface, but I am more excited about the actual data it provides you. With many analytics programs I have tested, it seems like you can’t get the data you are looking for without custom programming and tweaking. Below, details about what features it currently includes, and what I would like to see in future releases.

BLVD tracks the following metrics:

RSS Feed Subscriber Conversion:

You can set up your RSS feed URL as a conversion. Every time you get a new subscriber to your blog (or website) through your RSS Feed or Email Subscribe, BLVD identifies the keywords or the referring URL that was used to access your site. This tool eliminates the guessing game of trying to trace back the origins of the traffic and subscribers. Now you can know for sure.

Live Keyword Rankings:

This is one of my favorite features and I believe that many SEOs will be fond of it as well. Every time the site gets a visit from a search phrase, BLVD will provide the original phrase, what engine it came from, and what is the current or average rank for that word in the search engines. You can segment this out so it shows you one or all engines and recent or all time search referrals. This gives you a quick overview of where you are ranking on terms that are used to find your site.

Digg This Button:

You can set up the “Digg This” button through BLVD Status to see who is voting on your story directly from your site. This is a great feature because cross-promotion on various social sites can lead to more Diggs if you have the button on your page, but I have always guessed as to whether Reddit, Mixx, StumbleUpon, Sphinn, or Twitter actually brings you the votes.

(Note: Chris has some excellent data on which sites perform better from his testing that he says he will be releasing later on his blog. One thing he told me is that Reddit usually does much better than StumbleUpon for giving you a better ‘Digg push’.)

The dashboard also includes Referring Domains and has some nice options with that, including foot traffic, site URLs, and outgoing links.

In Depth Detail:

At the bottom of almost all the dashboard boxes you will see an “In Depth” button. That shows detailed segmentation and calendar reporting settings. In the Conversions section you can compare dates and look at which words convert more and how often they do. There is also Geo IP info and much more. One of my favorite In Depth sections is the Site URLs section, where you can look at any URL on your site for any given date range and see the exact keywords that brought people straight to that URL, what referrers did the same, what outgoing links were used the most on the page, GEO IP info, and much more. It is a really good way to narrow down your analytics to one page at a time and really analyze what is going on within any given piece of Content.

Current Bugs or Limitations

Chris Bennett and team are dedicated to build this “for the people by the people” style, and they are implementing a lot of suggestions that the private beta testers gave. They seem to be open to anything and everything that makes sense (so if you use it – be sure to send them your feedback!)

Some changes that I would like to see include:

• Standard documentation
• Improved UI so users don't miss the "In Depth" section
• Ability to assign a dollar value to any type of conversion (this is key to me)
• Ability to look at as many results as you want in the Dashboard (instead of limiting it to 10 or 20)
• Ability to drag a specific box to be wider on the Dashboard
• Improved support of non-alphabetic characters in domain names (if a user signs up a domain with a trailing slash or anything else a tad out of the norm, it can cause data problems)
• Faster servers

All of these and more are being worked on and will most likely be offered. There was a suggestion for a WordPress Plugin and it is already released as well.

Some future features that are coming:

• Custom alerts, such as referrals from a certain domain or if you get Dugg or Stumbled.
• Mobile Dashboard to view your stats live on your cell phone.

If you’re looking to get more information on your search and social media campaigns, I would definitely recommend checking out the (free) BLVD Status software and be sure to email chris [at] blvdstatus.com with any suggestions or improvements or bugs.

*Fun fact* Curious as to where the name BLVD Status came from and to the strange title of this post? It was actually inspired by a lyric from this song by A Tribe Called Quest. The exact line is “When I left for Rosie I was Boulevard status.” The line basically means he was at the top of his game. Chris Bennett always liked the line and bought the domain with the hopes of having a business that could use it down the road.

Chris Winfield is the President and Co-Founder of 10e20, an Internet marketing company that specializes in social media & search marketing services and is based in New York & Florida. The Let’s Get Social column appears Tuesdays at Search Engine Land.

By now you have probably seen a bunch of talk about Twitter. And after all of this talk you might be still thinking: OK, so what the heck is Twitter really and why should I care? How is it going to help my business at the end of the day? Rather than writing this column myself, I decided to let Twitter (or more specifically, my extended Twitter network) write it for me. This is me on Twitter (feel free to add me). So let’s get started…

The best way to demonstrate the usefulness or power of something is to show real examples. I started this experiment at approximately 5:20 PM EST on Monday afternoon. Within 1 hour, I had over 80 different replies that answered all of my questions and more. Within 1 hour I had reached out to people from all over the world and they had reached back.

It all started with this simple question: “How would you describe twitter in 140 characters or less?”

Below are some of the answers. If you are interested in engaging with active people on Twitter – I would suggest following these folks. They are there for the conversation and to give back. In the end, that’s what it’s all about…

BrettfromTibet: Twitter is where instant messaging meets social networking

rabeidoh: Twitter is IM on hyperdrive. Instead of reaching only one person, you can interact with thousands.

thomsinger: Twitter is an experience only understood once experienced. It is both blog and IM rolled into an addictive communal ritual

Rhea : My tiny blog, but posts and comments get lumped with everyone’s. News, gossip, personal, fun finds; Twitter is my brain dump.

dedmond29: for me: conversations, insights, information and discoveries. The more I contribute, the more I get back.

audette unparalleled access to influencers & colleagues, economy of words makes value easy to distinguish, and it’s pretty damn fun!

lauracallow is an interactive online playground for the socially connected where rapid fire communications are inspired, shared & stored.

Honorable mention to the cheeky ciaranj: Twitter is a mix of kind of cool, really? WTF? & insanely interesting

OK – that was a great start. And there were many more excellent answers but I think that gives you five very different overviews of Twitter. Don’t forget – every message you write on Twitter forces you to keep it under 140 characters. So you have to try to get your point across clearly & succinctly. Since this idea was for based around my Search Engine Land column, I thought: “How can Twitter help marketers?” Because let’s face it – if it’s not something useful for your business, we shouldn’t be talking about it here.

brianmark It can open a conversation between marketers and customers with little effort.

KeriMorgret Easy way to get informal research..either direct questions, or by watching what people say about your brand/product area.

martinbowling it helps marketers by providing them a captive audience to promote materials & interact with influencers & niche linkerati

oilman twitter can be a great personal brand builder – #TTwT is freakishly successful so far

ioerger Can Twitter help marketers? Twitter is the instant feedback loop marketers use to understand if they are on the right track.

chiropractic marketers benefit from twitters ability to move info rapidly. Views, votes, comments, retweets, and more help spread seeds.

Honorable mention to the cheeky willcritchlow: by distracting their competitors…

OK , but is there any real business being done on here? Are conversions happening? If not – who cares, right? So I asked “Have you ever bought anything because of Twitter?” bonus points for: what? :)”

tonyadam Webhosting based on a twitter poll i sent out a month or so back…went with gate.com

brianchappell Dell 22 inch lcd. they have a twitter account and announce discount codes.

jenstar Well, does getting a product recommendation count? I’m buying a speciifc headset because @oilman and @rossdunn recommended it

Frozen2Late I followed @amazondeals and ended up ordering discounted tea after I saw a tweet.

kid_disco Yep, I did buy a $100+ mouse thanks to @KeriMorgret ‘s suggestion via Twitter…

Honorable mention to the cheeky coplandmj: No, although I’d buy my soul back from Twitter if I could.

Personally I had already seen how Twitter could easily drive purchases. Here’s a quick example. I needed a way to hook up my laptop to a third monitor. I had the monitor sitting on my desk at my house and the guys at my local chain electronics store were completely clueless (they had something if I wanted to hook up two computers to one monitor). Then one day I was at a conference and I saw this message from Li Evans:

Then this follow-up from Avi Wilensky:

Now Avi is someone who I trust and who knows his stuff. Within about 5 minutes I ordered the adapter from USB Gear and got it within 3 days. It didn’t matter if that was a client, his own website, or something completely unrelated to him. He had made a recommendation for something I needed (without even knowing it) and it filled my need at the perfect moment. To me that’s one of the most powerful things that Twitter brings to the table.

So how do you find out about opportunities like that? What are the tools that make it easier? That was my final question for the night: “What is the best tool you have used to track buzz or conversations on twitter?”

kensavage Google blog search has to be the best and search.technorati.com a distant 2nd

tonyadam you can setup the “track” feature in twitter similar to how you would google alerts, e.g. “track 10e20″.

scottclark Summize + RSS + Feedreader… blogged about that last week. http://snurl.com/2681l

dewaldp Tracking buzz: TweetScan.com, twitter.summize.com, and the “track” feature of Twitter in GTalk.

Honorable mention to charlyjl Are there tools? I’ll have to read your column! lol

So there you have it. A post written by Twitter. Thanks to everyone above for your help and thanks as well to danperry, bausermedia, feedmelinks, kelly_gaia, m38967, frankmartin, footinmouth, smsRob, dingman, adriansoare, Blakovitch & toddmintz.

Want to learn more about the other Let’s Get Social columnists on Twitter? Then check out Brent Csutoras, Cameron Olthuis, Muhammad Saleem & Neil Patel.

Chris Winfield is the President and Co-Founder of 10e20, you can follow him on Twitter here. The Let’s Get Social column appears Tuesdays at Search Engine Land.

In order to be successful on social media news and bookmarking sites, you have to think like a typical power user. Start by understanding some fundamental truths about the users of these sites. For the most part they are busy. They skim. They want you (the publisher) to do a lot of the work for them. So here’s how to cover all of your bases and K.I.S.S.

It all starts with a great title. In the SEO world most people will tell you that your title is the most important on-page factor. Same thing is true for social media and bookmarketing sites. Your title can make or break your article. On a site like Reddit, there is no description option, so it’s all about the title. Take a couple of extra minutes to put some thought into a creative title for your content. You’ll be happy you did.

Need help? Try these.

Subheadings are sexy. You know what your content is about better than anyone. Why not provide a short summary right under your title? This way someone can use that as a description instead of just grabbing the first two sentences (that might be way out of context). Great examples of this can be seen on any story by the BBC.

Pictures are worth a thousand words. Great imagery can go a long way. On a site like Digg it can mean the difference between success and failure. Digg allows you to have a thumbnail image for any news article that gets submitted. People’s eyes are naturally drawn to images. So if users have the choice between a submission with a thumbnail and one without it – well….

Be sure to check this yourself on Digg though to make sure its image spider is finding the correct images. For good examples check out the Wall Street Journal, Divine Caroline, or ReadWriteWeb. Need help? Here’s our creative process.

No one wants to flip through 15 pages. Social media users are a fickle bunch. One thing that most will agree on is that they hate having to read your content spread out onto seven pages. Or check out your slideshow that is on 25 different ones. I know, I know. Each extra page view results in extra ad impressions. Social media users know this too. And they hate it. Would you rather 1,000 people viewing seven pages or 60,000 viewing two?

RSS. It’s not just for blogs. One of the biggest misconceptions I hear in regards to RSS is “My site isn’t a blog so I can’t have RSS.” If you have new content and you want people to be able to find that content easily, put it out in RSS. Make sure people know that you have RSS. Is Time Magazine a blog? Here’s a great overview to get you started.

Oh yeah, Pop culture references can also help. Like the one I used as inspiration for this post…

Chris Winfield is the President and Co-Founder of 10e20, an Internet marketing company that specializes in social media & search marketing services and is based in New York & Florida. The Let’s Get Social column appears Tuesdays at Search Engine Land.

One of the most overlooked but important keys to success on social news sites is commenting (expressing a personal opinion or belief).

One of the biggest draws for many social news sites is that you can interact with fellow members and the submitters through comments. Many users go to the major social news sites (such as Digg or Reddit) mainly so that they can voice their opinions on stories and carry on the conversation that the story starts. As such, the comments on any particular story are vital to its success.

Many people believe that a major key to Digg’s algorithm is the number of comments that a story has. As a result, many people who attempt to game its system think that all a submission needs is comments. So, we get stuck with crap like this:

If the submitter of that story and their cohorts cared to really find out how people on Digg actually communicate, they would know those comments are not helping them at all. Many people on Digg or Reddit look at commenting this way: bad comments = suspicion. Lots of bad comments = spam.

When the community sees multiple comments exclaiming the virtues of something, they are doing to downvote those comments and your story to Bury Land. This is in their blood, and they are usually right. Many sites that pay people to vote on sites also have these users leave comments. Many forums where you can do “vote exchanges” ask people to leave a comment so they can easily be identified. As such, social news users are rightfully wary.

The problem with this is that overly eager (or even overly positive) people can get lumped in with spammers and become an accidental by-product. When that happens, those comments get down-voted and your whole story can wind up getting flagged as spam. Here’s how to keep that from happening.

Think quality, not quantity. This is foundational to all good social media marketing. If you are really contributing something of value, it is more likely to be successful. If you are just on there to churn and burn, you probably aren’t going to have a long shelf life. 3 quality comments on your story will go much further than 13 junk ones.

Be real. If you are asking someone to comment on one of your submissions, tell them to be real. If the content is junk, this might not work and you might want to think about why you are submitting junk. Here’s what a real comment looks like:

Don’t be overly positive. If your only contribution to a story you liked is “Awesome!”, then refrain. Your positive vote already voiced that for you. Since most spam comments are extremely positive and basically filler, try to refrain from things that are overly upbeat unless you are just as prepared to speak your mind when you do not agree with something.

Have an opinion. Don’t forget what defines a comment. It’s a statement that has a personal opinion. State your opinion on the story. Kick off or continue the conversation.

Use humor. This should only be done if you truly know what the particular network you are on likes. But a comment that uses an inside joke or something topical the right way can give a story the extra juice it needs to put it over the top. Like this:

Be wary of the tone. If comments on one of your stories start heading south, take control of the situation. Use the guidelines above to contribute to the conversation in a meaningful way. If you are asking for someone to help, be sure they are following the same guidelines. If you don’t agree with someone’s comment on your story, feel free to vote them down.

When dealing with social news networks, the comments can mean the difference between a home run and a strike-out. The more that you understand the culture and what works, the better off you will be. Get involved and provide value with your comments and make sure that people you are sending your stories to do the same.

Chris Winfield is the President and Co-Founder of 10e20, a specialized social media marketing company. The Let’s Get Social column appears Tuesdays at Search Engine Land.

Traffic. Is your goal to get more traffic? Are you looking for more brand recognition? Do you have CPM based advertising on your website? Measuring traffic generated by a viral campaign is one of the simplest benchmarks. Simply measure the traffic generated to the specific URL through your web analytics package. Check out Tamar’s great breakdown of 6 Free (or nearly free) analytics packages here.

Links. Are you looking to naturally build links to help with your search engine optimization efforts? Linkbaiting can be extremely effective for this, but you should track where the links are coming from and whether or not they are helping you. I recommend checking links at the 1 and 7 day marks using either Technorati or Google Blog Search, then at the 30 day mark using Yahoo! Site Explorer or Google Webmaster Tools (use this FireFox plugin from Joost de Valk for extra info). Simply put the full URL (yourdomain.com/viral-piece.htm for example) into any of those engines and see who is linking back to you.

Buzz. Are people talking about you or your company due to the social media work you are doing? You need to know who’s saying what, and most normal search engines won’t track this. You can use free services such as Serph to help track what’s being said in places like forums and social networks. You can use Serph to search for things like your company name, the title of your linkbait piece or tool, etc.

Bookmarks. Bookmarks will tell you how many people felt your content was important enough to want to revisit at a later time or share with their own network. There are tons of online bookmarking sites out there, but I like to use del.icio.us to gauge the overall interest level. Simply go to the del.icio.us URL page and input your full URL (as explained above) – it will then tell you how many people have bookmarked your site and the different tags they used (which is important to see if people are tagging it with what you had intended).

Conversions. At the end of the day everything should come down to this. Many people want to discount direct sales via social media marketing, but that should never be the case. I firmly believe that you should craft your viral pieces in a way that will help to generate conversions and track them closely for such. Sometimes this might have to come after you have launched and have promoted your piece via the major social networks, but other times it might be the whole goal. Define what conversions you want to have happen and then track each. Do you want more people to sign up for your newsletter? Subscribe to your RSS feed? BUY YOUR PRODUCTS? You can do this simply and for free using Google Analytics.

With these different metrics, its important to put a realistic expectation for each in place before you launch your campaign. Think about what you want to accomplish and define your goals as specifically as you can get. Tracking your results and measuring them against your goals is the most effective way to tell if your efforts were successful and had a positive return on your investment (whether that investment be through time or money).

Chris Winfield is the President and Co-Founder of 10e20, an Internet marketing company that specializes in social media & search marketing services and is based in New York & Florida. The Let’s Get Social column appears Tuesdays at Search Engine Land.

Follow these ten simple steps and you will be well on your way to being more connected, more plugged in, and more efficient in 2008.

#1 – Connect. Add 2 contacts per week on either LinkedIn or Facebook. It’s a great way to connect with people and get opportunities flowing. If you simply add 2 people per week, that will be 102 new people per year that are in your network and who you can possibly work with. Time Spent: 1 hour per week.

#2 – Master a Forum. Find one active forum (check to see how often people are posting) in your niche and create a real profile there. Introduce yourself and get involved – use the private messaging features to introduce yourself to other influential members (DON’T sell). Once you have made contributions, then feel free to share your products or services with the other members of the forum. Time Spent: 2 hours per week.

#3 – Cut Down & Move Up. Get rid of most of the blogs in your feed reader. Unless you are running a site that relies on that latest news, you probably don’t need to read hundreds of blogs each day. Instead, focus on a handful in your industry that are viewed as highly influential. Comment at least once per week on each of those. After a month, email the author to let them know how much you enjoy their blog. When you have something good that you are looking to build links to, email them. It’s no longer a “cold-call” now. Time Spent: 5 hours per month. Time Saved: 10 hours per month not reading everything.

#4 – Meet a Digger a Day. Spend 15 minutes per day (during the week) contacting a new person from Digg via instant message and forging a bond. You can usually locate this information right on their profile page and add them to your IM program. This simple task will do more for your chances of success at Digg than anything else you can ever do. Trust me. Most of the active diggers also have profiles on a lot of the other social networks, so you are killing many birds with one stone. Time spent: 15 minutes per day.

#5 – Get Universal. Take advantage of Google Universal with video optimization. Create 1 video for your business and put it on YouTube. Build links to it. Hey, if a chiropractor can do it, so can you. Time Spent: 5 hours to create the video and 5 hours to get links to it.

#6 – Think Globally. For each submission that you make to Digg or reddit – use the same exact title and description and translate it to Spanish and submit to meneame (a “Spanish digg”) and Scoopeo (a “French digg”). You’ll be surprised at how much traffic and links they can generate (and you don’t even have to translate your content). Use a quick translator to make this super easy. Time Spent: 10 Minutes Per Submission.

#7 – Focus. Stay away from the over-hyped, all-purpose social networks that don’t drive traffic or influence people. They are out there and they want to suck your time up. Don’t let them. If they can’t get you decent traffic or links, don’t waste your time. This is why it’s so important to track your work closely and make sure you see where results are coming from. Time Saved: Countless Hours.

#8 – Answer. Answer 5 questions per day in your niche on Yahoo! Answers. Link drop to one of your sites every 5th answer. Time Spent: 15 Minutes per day.

#9 – Join the Conversation. Once per day, use a tool such as Google Blog Search or Serph to search for your name and your company. See where people are talking about you and join in on the conversation. Time Spent: Varies on your company, but should be less than 20 minutes.

#10 – Year in Reviews. If you own a business or work for a client that does, there’s a good shot that user generated reviews can play a big part in your life. Find out all of the places that are featuring your company and create a review there. Whether it’s Amazon, Epinions, Yelp, CitySearch or Google Local, they should all have reviews of your company from the people who know it best. Time Spent: 15 minutes per review + 5 minutes per day asking customers and contacts for reviews.

By embracing this holistic approach to social media marketing, you can accomplish so much for your business and spend less than five hours per week doing it. There will be other factors that come into play (creating linkbait, writing blog posts, etc), but by sticking to core basics like this you will have a strong blueprint for social media success in 2008!

Chris Winfield is the President and Co-Founder of 10e20, a specialized social media marketing company. The Let’s Get Social column appears Tuesdays at Search Engine Land.

If you get past those barriers and your content has made the homepage of Digg or Reddit and is attracting links like crazy, your page now has juice and will get latent traffic from blogs, forums, other social networks, and the search engines. But if you are anything like our clients, you want to know, “What next?” Here are some options for gaining additional leverage with your newly powerful pages.

Re-optimize the page. Many times when creating your viral piece you don’t take SEO into account (on purpose) and have a nice, friendly page title such as “101 Best Things Ever.” After your page has done well on Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc., go back in and do some SEO work on that page. Optimize it for some terms that are close to the original subject matter and that will get you business. Why? Consider it akin to backing into SEO. You can’t go ahead and title your compelling viral piece “101 Best Things Ever Especially My Green Widget on Sale for $49.99″ when you are just getting started with a promotion. After the piece has done its job and you’ve got your links, take advantage of the link juice the page has attracted and add some terms in that are actually going to bring you buyers from search engines.

Add calls to action. Perhaps you already added some subtle calls to action before you submitted a story, such as “Subscribe to my RSS feed” or “Bookmark it on del.ico.us,” but now it’s time to really sell your stuff. You can go back in and add links to your products or services and lead your visitors to where you want them to go. Why? Now that you’ve made it to the top of the social networks, you no longer have to fear the “bury.” Don’t be shy about pointing people that are on your site to places where they can get more of your great content, schedule an appointment with you regarding your services, or buy your product (which hopefully still has something at least loosely to do with your viral piece—but that’s another column in and of itself).

Advertise. Don’t want to change anything? That’s fine. Simply use this page as new real estate to advertise your services on. One of the quickest ways to take advantage of this is to put up one of your banners redirecting people to a different page on your site. Don’t add any ad tracking and that will help to circumvent any ad blocking software that social media users might be using. Why? It’s the equivalent of getting people into your store for a special sale. Show them what else you have that they might be interested in.

Redirect the page. A more drastic measure is to do a permanent redirect of the popular page to somewhere else on your site or another site. By doing this, all of the visitors who come to the old page will now be redirected to the new page. A permanent redirect will also help to transfer the link equity the popular page has built to the new page. Why? Maybe your viral piece was more timely and is no longer relevant. You’ve got people out there who have bookmarked your content and are linking to it. Don’t waste that traffic. Bring the users somewhere into your site that promotes what you are about right now.

I never recommend being too hasty with making changes. Track where your visitors are coming from and what they are doing. Get an understanding of what’s working and be sure you are well informed about potential benefits and consequences before implementing anything new.

Chris Winfield is the President and Co-Founder of 10e20, an Internet marketing company that specializes in social media & search marketing services and is based in New York & Florida. The Let’s Get Social column appears Tuesdays at Search Engine Land.

Currently, the majority of the Wall Street Journal’s content is available to paying members only. There are some free articles, but for most stuff, you will get prompted with this screen:

Or perhaps just a snippet of the article like this:

Now the Wall Street Journal has added Digg buttons at the bottom of each article. Digg is the only social media news button that is currently on the site. Digg also said that this is not an exclusive deal, which means that we are likely to see more buttons down the road. I wonder if they will actually ever add buttons from another News Corp property called MySpace News (oh yeah, these are only supposed to be for sites that can actually drive you lots of traffic – heh!).

The way it seems to work is that if you are a Wall Street Journal subscriber logged into your account, you will see the Digg button at the bottom of the page. Once you click on it, the Digg window pops up (as Techconsumer notes, it’s very similar to the one on the NY Times). They are officially calling it their Remote Digg page. It’s a nice, simple pop-up that is co-branded with both the WSJ and Digg logos. From this screen you can either digg the story (if it has already been submitted) or submit it yourself (just as if you were on Digg.com):

One of the most interesting parts is what you see towards the bottom of this pop-up. Here you have a listing of the last 4 stories that have recently hit the homepage of Digg and also a listing of the 4 that are closest to going popular.

The interesting part is that if you click on any of these links, you are brought to the page on WSJ, not directly to the Digg page. I will be interested in seeing if this changes down the road as the Journal figures out that their members can help push their stories to the homepage by sending them directly to the Digg page and voting (especially since it’s already in a pop-up).

Now from Digg’s side, its users have access to content that is currently available to subscribers only. Taking the example from above (that at first I only had Free Preview access to), if I now click on it from the Digg page I can now see the entire story. It seems to be tracking this via referrer URL (Digg = Free and All Else = Pay).

Is this the first step in Rupert Murdoch’s promise to drop subscription fees when his News Corp takeover goes through? Yes. Does this also signal the end of all old media rules and traditions? YOU BETCHA.

Chris Winfield is the President and Co-Founder of 10e20, an Internet marketing company that specializes in social media & search marketing services and is based in New York & Florida.

A few weeks ago at SMX Social Media, presenter after presenter (myself included) stressed the importance of making sure your hosting would be able to handle the effects of a strong viral campaign. The message was simple: “If you’re going to target Digg, reddit, del.ico.us and the like, be prepared.” There is no bigger waste than seeing a great piece of viral content fall flat because the server couldn’t withstand the load. And yes, these sites can deliver a lot of traffic.

Here are some of the key reasons you should never allow your site or blog to go down, even for a few seconds:

Your website will be offline. Duh—of course! If your website isn’t up you can’t make sales. It can’t give information about your company. It can’t do any of the things that you built it to do. Any downtime is too much. It’s akin to promoting a sale for your store, hiring extra workers to handle the load, buying extra merchandise to sell in the store, and then forgetting to unlock your doors. All of your customers are waiting outside (on a social site reading a snippet of your story) and trying to get in (click through) and they just can’t. They get frustrated, walk away, and doubtfully return. But let’s look beyond that for a moment and see what you lose specifically from your viral campaign.

Links. Many of our clients have one major goal with viral pieces: get me links. But when your site goes down it makes this very hard. How can people link to a page that isn’t there? On Digg for example, people will throw up mirrors (such as DuggTrends) when your site goes down and will then give out links to the mirrors in the comment section. This is helpful to users, sure, but those precious links you are after will go to these mirrors instead of your own URL (or, more likely, nowhere at all).

Bookmarks. Your site just hit the homepage of Reddit. Many of those users will use another service (such as del.ico.us) to bookmark it for later. This will lead to return visits, more exposure, and possibly the “Popular” page there. But if your site isn’t up, people aren’t going to bookmark it. Why would you bookmark something when you don’t know what it is?

Increases your bury meter. Many users will feel that if your site can’t stay up then what good is it to them? And thus – why does it deserve to be on the homepage of “their” site? When your site goes down, you are just giving users another reason to bury it.

No user engagement. This is especially true for blogs. You want comments, you want people subscribing to your RSS feeds, and you want them to “look around.” If they can’t access your content, they can’t do any of those things.

What’s one of the easiest ways to prevent downtime? Talk to your web site host or server administrator. Find out the real capabilities of your hosting setup. Give them a heads up on your plans (date and times of your scheduled viral launches) and make sure they can handle it. If they say they can’t, get a better system in place before moving forward. If they tell you not to worry and they know that the site can handle “at least 100 visitors at a time,” step back. It’s not worth flushing all of your hard work down the drain because you were impatient.

There is analogy after analogy that I can write here to try to drive my point home. But when it comes to keeping your hosting up and really taking full advantage of the tremendous benefits of a successful linkbait piece, the best advice comes from the Boy Scouts: Be Prepared!

Chris Winfield is the President and Co-Founder of 10e20, an Internet marketing company that specializes in social media & search marketing services and is based in New York & Florida. The Let’s Get Social column appears Tuesdays at Search Engine Land.