The Social Media Manual: Read Before You Play
I get so many questions from people about Digg, Propeller, Reddit, Stumbleupon and other social news sites every day, that I decided to write this little "manual" as something to read before you jump in head first into any social site …
Context & Ripple Effects
Digg spent September 2007 turning from a vote machine into a social network: it launched revamped user profiles and friend-finding features aimed at helping its expanding audience find like-minded users (Digg Goes Deeper with Social Networking). That same audience expansion is what makes a beginner's manual timely — more marketers and publishers are arriving at social news sites without knowing their norms.
The manual also lands amid skepticism about what these sites actually deliver: an October 2007 analysis found Digg homepage hit counts swing from hundreds to thousands of Diggs per story, making a front-page appearance a poor indicator of real site popularity, while earlier commentary flagged that Digg's 'mob wisdom' is interesting but not always right.
First-order effects
- Marketers reading the manual enter Digg, Propeller, Reddit and StumbleUpon with explicit etiquette guidance, raising the odds their submissions survive communities that punish obvious self-promotion.
- For Digg specifically, the wave of new users its September profile and friend features invited now meets a documented reality check: front-page placement does not reliably translate into meaningful site traffic.
Second-order effects
- Sites courted by social media submitters face volatile referral spikes whose size varies story by story, pressuring publishers to weigh whether blocking or courting social traffic pays off economically.
- As more newcomers arrive armed with how-to guides, the gap between genuine participation and tactical submission widens, pushing platforms like Digg toward stronger filtering and recommendation tooling to separate signal from gamed votes.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, social news sites professionalize around a split between casual crowds and trained power submitters — the 'mob wisdom' critiques suggest crowd voting alone will not settle which of the two defines each platform's value.
- Etiquette manuals like this one mark the moment social media shifts from hobbyist playground to a recognized marketing discipline, with its own playbooks, measurement debates, and eventual platform countermeasures against manipulation.
The trend: Social news sites are absorbing a wave of marketer-driven participation faster than their community norms can absorb it, forcing platforms to choose between open voting and anti-gaming controls.