The great thing about the #digg it experiment (trying to use Twitter to increase visibility for progressives, feminists, and women of color on Digg), is that it’s so easy to explain to people*:
- if you’ve got a story you’re trying to promote on Digg, include the #digg hashtag when you tweet it, and at least one of #p2, #rebelleft, #topprog, #fem2, or #woc
- if you see something with the #digg hashtag, digg it if you think it’s interesting — and retweet it as well
The first round of experiments a few weeks ago went very well. So last Friday we decided to try again, sending mail to a couple of progressive mailing lists encouraging people to digg and retweet. Once again, the results were great.
Over 20 people have participated so far, and a total of 15 stories got tweeted with #digg and at least one of the progressive hashtags — most aggressively by Twitter user @diggleft. Of these, give got at least one retweet.
Post | tweets | total followers |
diggs |
Obama preferred to Reagan | 16 | 7644 | 167 |
College grads’ economic woes |
9 | 5350 | 18 |
Feingold and FISA | 3 | 1282 | 63 |
Iranian women to be stoned | 2 | 1124 | 51 |
Kansas redistricting |
2 | 2101 | 0 |
@HumanFolly’s tweet Wowza – “Obama Preferred Over Reagan — In Fox News Poll” http://bit.ly/QCPMe got the best propagation, with 15 retweets, reaching up to 7644 followers on Twitter. The story has 167 diggs, the most of any in the experiment so far. Of course, the original story was on Talking Points Memo, and no doubt it was being promoted in other ways. Clearly, though, Tweeple** are contributing a measurable percentage.
The relative impact was even larger for @sarahkatheryn’s tweet Please Digg http://tinyurl.com/cfsrlr Will Economic Woes Get better for College Grads? For a site like Future Majority, which doesn’t have TPM’s clout, Twitter’s impact can be even more significant.
And once again, the most successful efforts were originally tweeted by women. Coincidence? Probably not.
The single biggest thing I learned from this effort was @AmandaSteinberg’s excellent suggestion of including a sample tweet when asking people to participate.  There are some additional observations in the first comment, and I’d love to hear what others have to say.
First though, let’s keep experimenting:
- please digg this post — and retweet: RT @jdp23 results from Twitter/digg experiment: http://is.gd/myDg please #digg and RT! #p2 #fem2 #rebelleft #topprog
- the story about Iranian women being stoned is still active, so please digg and retweet it as well. RT @myrnatheminx: 8 Iranian women in imminent danger of being stoned to death for adultery: http://tinyurl.com/bwrugu #fem2 #p2 #digg
Thanks much — and stay tuned!
jon
PS: to see all the tweets with these hashtags, use the magic search query digg ( #p2 OR #rebelleft OR #topprog OR #fem2 OR #woc OR #LGBTÂ )
*My #Digg it! A proposal for women of color, feminists, and progressives on Twitter on Reno and its discontents has a lot more if you’re interested.
** people on Twitter. when in Rome …
jon | 09-Mar-09 at 10:14 am | Permalink
Some additional points worth highlighting …
Rather than tweeting a link to the digg post, @myrnatheminx and @KansasJackass instead pointed people to the original article. In email, Tracy Viselli explained to me that digg’s algorithm counts votes that come in via the original article as more valuable than votes directly from digg. On the other hand, it’s much easier on the digger if they get a direct link, and my guess is that very few people actually find the link to digg on the article and then realize that clicking on it isn’t enough (you still need to vote on the “digg it” link on the digg page). We’ll get better understanding of these tradeoffs as we continue to experiment.
To be honest, I have no clue if @diggleft heard about the experiment via email, saw it on Twitter, or came up with the idea independently. In any case, if he/she/they wind up taking an active role in finding stories progressives might want to digg — and redigging others’ stories — that’s a huge improvement over my initial proposal. Great thinking, whoever you are!
The first reply in an email thread where I asked the Get FISA Right group for help on the Feingold and FISA illustrates one of the challenges here: there’s a lot of skepticism about the value of digg and Twitter. Here’s my perspective:
Of course, not everybody sees it that way. Still, a lot of people do; and the results so far continue to be encouraging.
Sarahkatheryn | 09-Mar-09 at 12:21 pm | Permalink
I love to hashtag tweets and help promote people’s stuff – further I love to tweet while at conference and such. My problem is that my tweets are invisible to search.twitter.com. no matter what I do… I’m always invisible. I have a public account feel free to add me at @sarahkatheryn but please know that I can’t RT you because its a waste of time my hashtags never show up.
Also – I’ve been waiting for over a month for my service request to be answered. I’ve emailed twitter … I’ve done everything. Evidently I’m also invisible to twitter tech support.
jon | 09-Mar-09 at 4:35 pm | Permalink
Sarahkatheryn, I noticed that your original tweet didn’t show up in the Twitter search … bizarre. I wonder how many others this affects?
jon | 09-Mar-09 at 4:36 pm | Permalink
Hmm. There might have been some unintended consequences of this experiment … here’s some email I just sent to Digg support:
It’ll be interesting to see what they say …
jon | 09-Mar-09 at 4:59 pm | Permalink
digg support quickly replied to my email letting me know that I had been banned “submitting content that promotes the abuse and gaming of Digg” and offering to reinstate me if I agreed not to do it again.
My reply:
jon | 04-Apr-09 at 8:59 am | Permalink
Digg support never replied to my mail about why they saw discussion of how to promote a digg story on Twitter as “abuse and gaming” of digg. Oh well.
The next time I tried to submit a story from Liminal States to digg, I wasn’t allowed to. Even though they unbanned, my site remains blocked — meaning nobody can submit stories from here or from Tales from the Net. I emailed this to digg support who replied “sorry, you’re blocked.” Since this was around the same time as digg founder Kevin Rose was making a big splash with “@WeFollow”, his 85%-male Twitter directory, I wrote back to them saying:
No response.
Flash forward to a couple of days ago, when digg announced their “digg bar”, which among other things makes it very easy to promote digg stories on Twitter. Huh. Looks like I had that one pegged. Kevin and digg really do think that different rules should apply to them than everybody else.
And several stories on the digg bar hit the front page. Looks like digg also thinks that different rules should apply to Mashable and TechCrunch than to me.
BTW, diverts traffic and ad revenue from the original web site to digg, and as Brian X. Chen’s DiggBar Digs up Bitter Nostalgia Among Critics reprises the failed Gator/Claria strategy from the 90s annoying a lot of people in the same way that and others did in the 90s. As with @WeFollow (currently following 3 people, followed by 100,000+) this highlight’s digg’s self-centered attitude.
It also is buggy, and at least for me keeps showing up no matter how many times I click “Always hide”. Unless they fix that, it’s only a matter of time until people stop following digg.com links from Twitter.
Thejsh GN’s How to kill that digg bar frame has instructions for how to prevent digg from framing your site.