Bramblog

When I’m chumming for links w/ SMM, I typically like to say “shoot for digg, settle for stumble, pick up the scraps w/ mixx.” Well…I’m spending a LOT of time this week working on my propeller account. I’ve never picked up any significant traffic from mixx, but I still think it’s solid tool to use to cross promote.

So…I’ve been trying to figure out other sites to use to promote material. Disco emailed me yesterday to let me know that a particular piece would do well on reddit & propeller. From my experience, reddit can definitely drive traffic -a couple of pieces got 30k+ visitors when they went hot naturally.

However, I don’t like reddit. IMO, the branding is too poor to ever gain a wide audience, and it lacks the tools necessary to promote a piece – namely, sharing with friends. So, reddit traffic = good. Reddit functionality = bad.

I do like propeller, but I haven’t promoted there much. The audience seems to be more mature than digg, and there are proper categories for a lot of pieces that I wouldn’t be able to submit on digg. The functionality is good – you can add friends & shout to them. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like you can “select all” so shouting will become a chore with a massive friends list (edit – you can shout to 5 friends at a time…huge pain in the ass – will probably code a solution.) Also, I couldn’t find a way to integrate the vote count with your site (someone please correct me if I’m wrong.) But it looks like the biggest plus will be the traffic. I checked out the alexa results for reddit, mixx, & propeller, and it looks like prop comes in a close second to reddit (which I know can drive 30k+ visitors.)

So…I’m signing off to start working on my prop account. I’ll push a couple of stories, and report back w/ some traffic counts!

We’ve been running a ton of digg campaigns, and using the Ajaxonomy Bury Recorder on all of them. In theory, it’s great. Using the digg spy feed, it watches for buries, and tells you how many buries a particular post has. Great in theory. We’ve been using it to watch different submissions and were shocked to find that many of our submissions were yanked from upcoming w/ zero buries according to ajaxonomy.

So…Ken Smith & I have been pretty pissed about the whole “digg nazi” deal. Then Ken decided we needed to run a test on the credibility of ajaxonomy. Bottom line – it doesn’t work.

We picked 5 random stories that had gone hot (not popular) so that we knew they had some exposure. We put them all on the bury recorder, and then we both buried them for specific reasons (spam, duplicate, general.) Between the 2 of us, we had 10 total buries to watch for. One was recorded by ajaxonomy – one. So, according to this test, ajaxonomy is sitting at ~10% accuracy.