For most people and most pictures, sharing it on Facebook or Twitter is enough. It may be a quick snapshot of you and your friends out on the town or a cool sunset from a mountaintop and sharing it with our friends and family is enough. Other times, we’re able to capture something amazing, stunning, hilarious, or otherwise important enough to want to expose it to the rest of the world.

With those, we want to go viral. Here’s a (relatively) quick way to maximize the exposure of your perfectly-timed, once-in-a-lifetime shot.

To do this, you’ll need to be on several different social networks. It may seem like a large list but once you’re signed up the actual posting of this and future pics is a breeze.

You’ll need accounts here:

• Chime
• Pinterest
• Tumblr
• Buzzfeed
• Digg
• Reddit
• StumbleUpon
• Facebook
• Twitter

Wow! That’s a lot, right? Not really. If you’re into social media at all these are all sites that you should be frequenting monthly, weekly, or even daily. They’re the only social sites you’ll need if you’re into photography, laughs, tech, offbeat, or just about anything else.

There are some notable exclusions, here, for those who have been in social photo sharing for a while. Flickr comes to mind as the first place that many people think of when wanting to share images, but there are challenges. First, it breaks frames, an announcing on sites like Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon where sharing is often done from with a toolbar. The results for those who click on a Flickr link is that it will not display the image but rather an obnoxious message telling you they don’t support frames.

Okay, once you have your accounts created, it’s time to start exposing it to the world.

My Unfortunate Choice of Pictures

As fate would have it, I’m not in a position to go take an amazing picture (it’s 2am right now) and this is the only thing on my camera with even a remote chance of going viral. It’s a picture I took while at the mall with my family and the sign struck me as being funny because of the wording of the message. In retrospect, it wasn’t that funny, but it’s the best I’ve got right now.

No matter – I love a challenge. If I can make this particular image go viral, your masterful piece of photography should be able to use the same techniques to spread around the world.

Once you have it on your computer, it’s time to get to work…

Chime It

Our first destination is Chime.in. The social network that was formerly Mixx before being grabbed up (and dramatically improved) by Uber Media hit the scene last year and is making a big splash. It’s the place we start for several reasons:

• It resizes large pictures for you automatically. in the world of sharing pics, it’s great to have a 10mb 2500px-wide image from your iPhone, but it’s hard to share. Uploading to Chime reduces the size to make it manageable and sharable.
• You can easily upload multiple images into a single gallery. Be sure that the primary image you want visible is the one that is uploaded last.
• The domain does well on the social sharing sites (discussed below).
• Unlike many of the photo sites, it allows you to write long descriptions with line breaks and links.

Again, I’m working with a challenging image to make viral, so I chose a headline that I thought would draw attention. It’s borderline offensive (the concept of eating kids is, well, sick and takes a depraved mind to think of it) but hopefully won’t be so bad that people won’t get the joke.

Be sure to use descriptive tags; you can post up to 7.

Pin It

Once you have it on Chime, use your “Pin It” bookmarklet to pin the image to a Pinterest board.

Don’t upload the original image. Using the bookmarklet will allow you to grab the image directly from your Chime. This links it back to the original Chime while making a separate instance of the image available on Pinterest.

The site is growing just like Chime and is getting plenty of positive press, so getting started early on these two sites will give you geek cred – like a hipster, you were on Chime and Pinterest before they went mainstream.

Pinterest does not allow you to title images per se, but you’ll be able to put in a short description. Unlike Chime, Pinterest does not do long descriptions very well and does not allow line breaks or links, so you’ll want to keep it short.

Tumbl It

Tumblr is a hybrid of many social functions. It’s decent for blogging, good for microblogging, and great for sharing image and videos.

It’s a bit more complicated than Chime or Pinterest, but it’s much bigger as well and gives you a nice venue for more than just pictures if you choose to use it or such things.

If you aren’t already on Tumblr, you can skip this step if you don’t want to invest the time into personalizing your blog with a theme, URL, etc.

As with Chime, tags are extremely important on Tumblr. Without them or a lot of followers, you won’t get natural views of your image. Don’t forget to set your click-thru link to either your Pin or your Chime.

Buzz It

Buzzfeed is one of the best-operated social networks out there right now from a sheer business perspective. They are aggressive and have a very clear understanding of how to drive traffic to their own site, reward their users, and get advertising dollars in ways that Twitter and others have failed at thus far. If they were as large as Facebook, they’d be making as much money as Google.

Unfortunately for you, it can be challenging to get to the front page. If you aren’t on the front page, you’re not going to get views from Buzzfeed itself which is why quality of content and promotion of your image is extremely important.

The good news is that Buzzfeed does very well on the social sharing sites, so even if you don’t make the front page of Buzzfeed initially, you’ll still be able to get visitors to it through the other networks, particularly StumbleUpon.

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This is going to be a make or break year for Digg.com. After the debacle of 2010′s V4 launch, many in the industry thought that the site would die a quick death in 2011. As the year comes to a close, Digg is far from dead and is poised for a rebound in 2012.

Here’s what we expect (hope) to see from the social news giant:

Nothing else will have any meaning if Digg doesn’t turn a profit by the middle of the year. They are on the path towards profitability with a high-click advertising model through inline, Diggable ads. They will need to get more and bigger clients to take advantage of it to get there.

If there’s one reason Digg brought in Matt Williams as CEO, it was his understanding of profitability and advertising development. His success at and before Amazon show that he knows what it takes to make money. Now, they simply have to stay the course and deliver the cash to investors.

If they don’t turn a profit in 2012, the site will fail regardless of any other changes that take place.

In 2012, real-time is going to be a determining factor in regards to relevance in the social news realm. Twitter, Reddit, and others are able to deliver breaking news quickly. Digg is heading in the right direction with 2 additions from 2011.

Staff picks is the easiest way to highlight major breaking news. When Kim Jong-il died earlier this week, Digg staff was quick to post the BBC story at the top of their staff picks section. As a result, it was propelled to be promoted quickly to the top news section and eventually became the top story of the day.

Newswire and Newsrooms are the other elements introduced in 2011 that will help with smaller but important breaking news. Both offer fast-moving venues for stories to gain quick exposure. Last week, Digg started utilizing Newswire stories more prevalently in their front page promotion algorithm, running a second algorithm side-by-side with their standard promotional algorithm to highlight Newswire stories. In essence, breaking stories have a way to get the attention they need more quickly and can be promoted to the top news section in a couple of hours rather than waiting the period necessary to hit the minimum Digg count for their primary algorithm.

One of the biggest complaints over the years with Digg (and social news sites in general) is that they are often closed gardens when it comes to website promotion. It’s challenging for new websites to find success on Digg because of the roadblocks the site’s algorithm have put in place.

Everyone wants diversity – highlighting Mashable and DailyMail with several stories every day hitting the front page doesn’t do much for using Digg as a discovery tool. The sites that people are already visiting regularly are the sites that Digg and other social news sites often highlight.

We expect to see a shift in 2012 to allow for smaller websites with interesting perspectives and content to hit the front page more often. It makes sense because small publishers will be more thankful and pay more attention to the spikes in traffic they receive from hitting the front page and will be more likely to cater content around Digg, even adding more prominent buttons or widgets. Larger sites like Mashable don’t even have Digg buttons on their stories anymore.

From a user perspective, knowing that Digg will highlight the best content from sources that we aren’t normally visiting will add value in the way that has helped StumbleUpon succeed in the last couple of years. There’s nothing better than finding an amazing piece of content on a site that we would have never even known about otherwise.

Most importantly, diversity will allow Digg to be a relevant visit for content publishers and aggregators. There was a time when site owners would visit Digg to find the latest and greatest offbeat or technology news for inspiration and discovery. Those days are gone but have a chance to return as Digg expands beyond the whitelisted mainstream media sites that have plagued them for years, even before V4.

It’s a fine line to tread in social news. Spam has been and always will be a problem when you have a site that relies on user votes for the content that they highlight. Mainstream media might not be exciting, but it’s safe. Digg must expand the sites they allow to hit the top news section, but they must monitor it carefully and fight the spammers as much as possible without being Draconian about it.

The site can always use more traffic. They can also use more engagement with the community. Adding more unique content in the form of blog posts and user-generated guest posts can kill both birds with one stone.

Those who run blogs know that unique content that gets linked to by other websites and shared by visitors on other social media sites is one of the keys to traffic. Digg has always done well in Google; more unique content will help.

They have indicated that they will be posting more content, particularly from users. I would love to see them posting a new unique story every other day or even more often, but as long as they’re posting something every now and then, they will grow.

* * *

Digg is at a crossroads. If they are able to stay the course and continue to hammer away at the various elements that will improve the site, they can be the feel-good rebound story of 2012. If they falter, they may be another MySpace waiting to happen.

Over the last year since the launch of version 4, Digg has faced challenges in regaining its relevance in social media. Traffic is down. Users are less active. It has seemed at times as if Digg may go the way of MySpace, Propeller, and Yahoo Buzz – social sites that were once big news but failed to adapt to a changing social sphere.

Today, they launched Digg Newsrooms in limited beta. If it’s as successful as they hope, it could mark the shift that the site has needed to get back to the top of the social news game.

“There are so many social signals on the web and no easy way to separate the news that is most meaningful about a topic from the news that is most popular,” said Matt Williams, CEO of Digg. “With Digg Newsrooms now you can stay on top of the news that matters most to you, and interact with others who share your passion for a given topic.”

Here’s a sneak peek; click to enlarge.

By presenting the “best news” on any topic, Newsrooms adds interesting layers that Digg has never had in the past. The most profound change is in discover of content. Newsrooms analyzes “social signals” from Facebook and Twitter to help surface content. In the past, stories were either submitted by users or fed directly into Digg from RSS feeds for a short period of time after Digg v4 launched.

Now content can be discovered by Newsrooms through Facebook likes, Tweets, or simply because a site has a tendency to give quality content surrounding the topic. Unlike the disastrous auto-submission function of Digg v4, Newsrooms will only surface the content; users must still Digg the story for it to be submitted. In the case below, you will see a story that has surfaced in Mobile but that has not yet been submitted.

It surfaced because it came from Intomobile or because of the 12 tweets that have already been sent about the story. Once I click the Submit button, it’s now in the queue and I become the submitter of the story.

According to alpha tester John Boitnott, “Overall, I think the “newsrooms” project is a gutsy attempt by Digg to bring in new users as well as some of the old ones.

His praise comes with a caveat. “However, they had better be ready to stick to their guns and make this new beta work over the long term.”

In addition to content surfacing and creating communities through which users can interact with like-minded people, Digg is adding a layer of “fun” to the site. Awards are given to users for certain activities such as Ace reporter for having their first story promoted to that Newsroom Front Page. Sites like Reddit and Buzzfeed have had relatively strong success with badge features.

What will all of this do for Digg? It’s very likely that they will get a nice burst of buzz, as it’s the most profound change they’ve made in a year. The key will be old user adoption and new user acquisition. If this gets enough attention to start bringing new users in and if it’s able to work well enough that current users find it useful, it may be enough to make Digg one of those rare success stories of a company that crumbled and then rose from the ashes to reinvent itself as a relevant social media site again.

One of the biggest complaints of Digg has always been in sorting. Even before V4 was rolled out nearly a year ago, it was often difficult to narrow down results and find content based upon certain criteria without having to do a direct search for keywords. Newswire, a new Digg feature still in limited beta, appears to be addressing the issue nicely.

Newswire gives users the ability to look at both what’s trending and what’s most recent and filter the results based upon categories and media type. It’s almost exactly like the Upcoming section except it adds two strong new features: minimum and maximum Digg counts and activity updates without refreshing. Notice in the image above just below the Newswire bar – clicking on that while in Trending reorders the stories based upon the trending algorithm without reloading the page. When sorting by most recent, the bar alerts you when new stories meet the criteria you’ve set.

This can be very useful for those wanting to use Digg for it’s original purpose – content discovery using the wisdom of the crowd. The initial vision of founder Kevin Rose was to offer a place where people could see the news based upon recommendations from like-minded people. The Upcoming section has never truly conquered this in a timely manner. While the Digg front page is a source of stories that have been fully vetted by the community, the road to get there has always been littered with spam.

Let’s say you want to keep up on gaming news. You want things while their hot – not only after they’ve hit the front page or accumulated enough Diggs to hit the Upcoming radar. Set your Newswire settings to Most Recent, Gaming, All Stories. In Upcoming, this would give you a tremendous amount of spam. With Newswire, you can set the criteria to include only stories over 2, 5, 10, or more Diggs and you’ll only see stories that have received at least a little action.

Keep that page open and go about your business. When a new gaming story meets your minimum Digg count, it will show up automatically on the page much the same as Twitter alerts us when there are new Tweets available to see.

The new feature also gives us insight into which stories are getting Diggs in the Newswire as well as how these Diggs are affecting their placement in Trending. As you can see to the right, I Dugg a story and as a result it moved up to 1st trending story. I’m not sure how this data can be used but it’s an interesting and different aspect of the site that has never been as transparent in the past.

We will see when this is officially rolled out and more users start playing around with it what the full benefits will be, but it’s a good sign that effort is being made to improve things. Here’s the official word from Digg presented to Beta users of the feature:

You’ve Entered the Newswire!

The Newswire is here to let you slice, dice and explore the freshest content on Digg. A variety of tools are at your disposal, and you may notice that isn’t all that’s different.

Stories can be sorted by Trending to find content which is becoming popular on Digg or Recent for the absolutely newest content the instant it arrives. Once you’ve selected a sort, you can also filter by Topic, Media, minimum Diggs and maximum Diggs. Mix and match to satisfy each moment’s news discovery craving.

As the tide of stories rise and fall, you’ll be notified that the order of stories have changed (when using the Trending sort), or that newer stories have arrived (when using the Recent sort). On the right, Activity on the Newswire shows the latest actions by you and other Diggers in the Newswire. When you Digg and Bury stories within the Newswire they’ll be shared there to help coordinate curation and discovery.

UPDATE: Please, oh please let this stick. One interesting feature we just noted is that Buries are showing visibly on the Newswire. If this is real, it would be a dream come true for many Digg users who do not like the fact that Diggs are visible, but buries are anonymous. To test it, I selected a story that is definitely spam (I apologize to anyone who goes to Digg to look for Canine Performance Supplements for active dogs) and there it was, clear as day, identifying me as the someone who dumped on dog lovers across the world. If this sticks, it could change the complexion of the site, taking away one of the biggest negatives that has plagued the site for years. We have contacted Digg for a statement.

What do people think social media professionals do for a living? They are not wizards like Gandalf. They can’t raise their staff and command visitors to become permanent residents of a site.

If Gandalf had his way, all visitors would stay onsite

OK let’s say a digital strategist gets the visitors to a site. Good enough. But at that point, publishers shouldn’t complain because now these new folks who have come aren’t suddenly their biggest fans in the world. They shouldn’t be mad because the bounce rate is high. Keeping the folks who arrive at a site isn’t the social media consultant’s job. It’s their job to shunt people over to the site. The rest is the publisher’s job, not the social media professional’s. (although just ask and they might be happy to help you with that)

People referred to a site from Twitter, Digg, Facebook or StumbleUpon do not stay very long to be sure, but their visits have an ancillary effect that causes a site to grow in the long term.

1.) For instance, Digg has a PR 8. If a post becomes incredibly popular there and reaches the front page, that is noted by Google. Therefore, that post may appear high in search rankings. For months after. For years after. A publisher should be happy with that because it is a nice thing.

2.) The post may be linked to other publications. There is a long history of this occurring. Millions of people use all of these social platforms. When a post goes viral on them, it leads to linkbacks if the content is appealing. Here’s the key thing that can’t be said enough. Publishers have to be consistent over a long period of time with utilizing these digital media strategies in order to reap this benefit. One cannot expect these strategies to make a community a paradise of commenting, clicking and interaction overnight. This stuff takes months and months of building. Be patient.

3.) I remember a story that is relevant here. One popular iPhone blog owner told me his reasoning for using Digg and other social media platforms had more to do with greater visibility in Google search results, particularly in news. When relevant search terms brought up his posts that had done well on Digg, they would often, as a result, appear in the coveted news section of the regular search results page.

Regardless, bringing “permanent” traffic is not what social media professionals do. Nor is it something that anyone can promise. Having said that, what they do does cause more people to “favorite” a site. It causes more people to share a site. It causes more people to place the site on their RSS feeds. It causes more people to come back to the site later. It causes more people to know the site exists. If that isn’t good enough for a publisher, then they don’t understand social media, or maybe even the web in general.

“Permanent” traffic doesn’t exist. Even Drudge Report, the Huffington Post, the New York Times, or the Guardian cannot depend on the same people returning to their site every day. Peoples’ attention spans are too short. And the ongoing love that the communities of those publications have for them is hard-won and hard-built over years. It’s not easy. It takes a long time. Social media is just one part of the strategy. Publishers should not get mad because their bounce-rate is high. Take the folks that come to you and make them want to stay by improving the site in question.

In an effort to improve “shareability” and make the site more sticky, Digg is experimenting with embedded images on the Digg submission permalinks.

For months, Digg has had (off and on at times) inline videos that could be played directly from the Digg post page for certain video sites like YouTube and Break. Last night, Digg started rolling out embedded images as well.

The idea is to improve the ability for their links to be shared on other social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. Digg has always been an aggregator of content rather than a place where people can see the actual pieces. Instead of sharing a Digg link, visitors would have to click from Digg to the source to see the image. As a result, the sharing was most likely done to the source rather than the Digg link.

Now (or whenever the bugs are worked out), visitors to the site will be able to see the full image and share it directly from the Digg page itself. This move is a smart one for Digg as it will not only increase sharing of internal links, it will also improve site stickiness. Any time someone has to click to another site to see the image, there’s a chance that they will remain on that site rather than going back to Digg.

There are a few bugs, of course, but it seems to be working well otherwise. In most cases of images submissions currently, they are only displaying the thumbnail. In other cases, the wrong image is displayed, such as this:

The Gravatar logo is displayed instead of the intended image on the blog page. Oddly enough, the Gravatar logo is not visible on the source post.

There will be complaints from publishers who will charge Digg with holding back on clicks and keeping the visitors to themselves, but they will still get good traffic if the post hits the front page. If anything, this should increase an image-submissions chances of making it if the content is strong enough.

Despite the upcoming complaints, this is a great move for Digg. Leveraging other social media sites is important to their success and is a feature not present on some of the other social news sites like Reddit and Slashdot. From a pure users’ perspective, it saves a click, making it easier to see the content without having to click to a new tab.

If the bugs get fixed, this will be a positive change that will increase overall site traffic. Digg is a site that helps content go viral. Now, they’ll have a better chance of going viral themselves.

* * *

Read more about Digg on this social media blog.

No, Digg is not dead. Not yet. Recent lack of certain actions have prevented the site from growing at the brisk pace it needs to regain relevance, but it’s not too late. Not yet.

As I posted on FastCompany last month, Digg has until May to get the help (which we’ve offered on multiple occasions free of charge) they need to get back on track or they will miss their last window of opportunity to keep from going the way of Propeller, MySpace, and Yahoo Buzz. That’s it. If they do not get help, statements such as RIP Digg and Why Digg Failed will prove to be spot on assessments of a site that should have been skyrocketing in 2011.

Shock Us

Stagnation in the press is the key to failure for sites that are on a popularity slide.  Of late, no news is the norm unless something juicy and bad pops up, such as Kevin Rose leaving. That helped to prompt the recent round of Digg-hate from the blogosphere.

There was a time when minor tweaks to layout were enough to warrant stories. Digg has been changing the UI significantly over the last 3 months. Nobody seems to care that much. It isn’t getting the play it needs.

One thing Digg must do if they ever want a positive headline written about them is that they have to take a risk. They have to shock the heck out of us with a feature that changes the game. They have to be ambitious, revolutionary, and they need to demonstrate a sense of urgency indicative of their current situation.

The times of minor UI changes are behind us. Do something huge.

Rumors of an upcoming “Communities” update is intriguing, but it will be panned by the cynical blogosphere and ignored by mainstream media. That sort of additional feature will only highlight the greatly-reduced engagement on the site and will not cut to the core of their real problem: they just aren’t cool anymore.

Here are some things that would qualify as “shocking” enough to generate headlines:

• Buy something. Delicious, rumored to be on the verge of a liberating sale from Yahoo, would have been a perfect acquisition in the low millions. The buzz surrounding such a melding of former powerhouses would have drawn skepticism, but there would have been many positives surrounding the potentials that would have generated positive buzz.
• Integrate. In a discussion with one of their VPs, we told them that integration with Twitter and Facebook AS their commenting system would be a way to bring views and potential new users to the site. No, we didn’t suggest adding buttons, which they (and every other site, it seems) already have. The concept we offered would give people reasons to share Digg content. Currently, there is no reason for anyone to Tweet or Share a Digg link because it would be better to simply share the source link instead. However, if they were able to comment on Digg and transmit that comment onto Facebook and Twitter, and conversely attach Tweets and Shares directly into the Digg story comments, they would have something unique and extremely intriguing. People would finally have a reason to bring their friends to visit Digg – it suddenly becomes about them rather than about Digg itself. People Tweet and Share their own opinions, not links to pages that require you to click to another link. “Look at what I wrote…” – now that’s something people would share. The idea was enjoyed by the Digg VP, but I haven’t been asked to elaborate or help with it in a month. That’s a pity, as it could be built and integrated in a couple of days.
• Create. Digg has no content of its own. It relies on people finding content. Digg should allow people to have their own venue to post even if there is no link involved. Self-Reddits are extremely popular and have proven to be some of the most discussed posts on that site. Digg could do it much better with a much stronger interface. Instead of sending users to other sites’ content, why not give people a venue to post their own content?

There are plenty of other concepts that would be groundbreaking for the site without risking further negative buzz. The rumored communities will not do that unless Digg is able to do it exactly right. Hopefully, they are consulting with users smarter than us if they plan on rolling it out anytime in the near future.

Take (or give) Control

One of the strengths of emerging sites like Buzzfeed is their willingness to take control of the content. Digg is a “democratic” site and has never (admittedly) hand-picked the content other than their Staff Picks section where they enjoy highlighting and rewarding sites that don’t appreciate them (such as CNN, YouTube, and HuffingtonPost, the three sites being promoted by Digg staff at the time of this article).

User-moderation has been controversial yet effective over at Reddit. If and when Digg rolls out moderation in some form, it will be viewed controversially. Unfortunately, it will not be viewed as effective if they don’t get input from the right sources. Today, many qualified users who are still using the site do so with an agenda in mind. Those without an agenda have either moved on or do not have the “eye” for content that a MrBabyMan or LouieBaur have.

Digg must tread very, very carefully if they want to go down this path. Reddit has made it effective because the agendas are limited and the need is strong – they simply don’t have the staff nor the resources to outsource content curation. Digg does and should.

By taking control or giving it to an organization that is qualified, Digg would have the ability to have 24-hour coverage. It would allow the site to generate buzz based simply on the ability to find the best content on the Internet. That’s the key to getting buzz from a quality-perspective – be a source for the latest and greatest, not a venue for news that’s hours, even days old.

If you break it, via-links will come.

V5

Had we’d been allowed to consult with Digg, the first thing we would have suggested would have been to create a campaign geared around the building of version 5. Turn a negative into a positive, just as any good PR firm would recommend:

“Yes, V4 sucked. We’re ready to start working on V5 and we want your input. Michael Arrington at Techcrunch, we want your input. Pete Cashmore, Jason Calacanis, JD Rucker (who?), Marshall Kirkpatrick… we want you to help us build the next big thing.”

Fly/drive them in, wine them, dine them, and then brainstorm with them. Let them get you excited, then build upon it and get them excited in return. Turn the press around. Turn the buzz to your favor. Get someone other than me posting hopeful articles. Get the extremely charismatic Matt Williams in front of them, shaking hands and humbly asking for help.

Win back the buzz.

It just seems to be a low-priority at Digg right now. PR is less important than… something. At this point, we’re not sure what exactly is important to the site. Their lack of action is not the way. Plans are worthless if they roll out too late.

I love Digg, but I’ve been telling them this stuff since January.

Kevin Rose has resigned from Digg. The founder and former CEO who helped put in place the debacle of Digg V4 is founding a new startup with a $1mil+ round of funding according to Techcrunch.

This comes as no surprise. His involvement at the site that put him on the cover of Business Week has been non-existent of late. I tweeted him back in December about his site and his response was, well, disengaged even back then:

It sounded to me back then that he wasn’t really engaged with the future of Digg.

What will his legacy be? Will he be tagged as the person who tanked Digg if it fails? Will he be considered the reason it grew but also the reason that if almost failed if Digg is able to come back from this? Will tech-insiders take his startup seriously when he has yet to demonstrate an ability to make a startup profitable?

Or has the sun set on the tech legend?

One thing is clear – the guy has vision when it comes to ideas. Digg, WeFollow, Pounce – all exceptional concepts. Pownce was plagued by being #2 in an area that only needed 1, Twitter. WeFollow still does well for its niche. He invested in a little company back in 2009 that you may have heard of: Zynga.

He knows tech. He knows people. Can this all translate into business success?

It appears we will find out very soon.

Update: This apparently wasn’t news to the staff and you can sense a hint of “he hasn’t been helping much lately, anyway.”

~ cduruk said, “Not to sound dramatic but this news means pretty much nothing to people working on the site. Nothing is changing, we are working on bringing you guys more cool stuff.”

Update 2: Confirmed.

If you’d come up to me just a couple days ago and asked if Digg were going to survive for the long haul, I’d have sadly opined, “No.”

After lobbing a few hand grenades in the form of questions at (relatively) new CEO Matt Williams the other day, I’m happy to report I can upgrade that to a Magic 8 Ball-like response of “Cannot Predict Now.”

By way of background, here’s the 50-cent version of my Digg story: Account since 2007, active user since early 2008. 130,847 diggs, 18,960 comments, 3,466 submissions and 1,054 popular stories. You could say I’ve been a healthy user of the site.

I won’t belabor the story about how Digg totally screwed up the site with Version 4. One thing I can say is that the current administration at Digg is far more responsive to the questions, complaints and compliments of its user base than any were previously.

So I was pleased to get an invitation to a pre-Diggnation meetup here at SXSW with Williams. It was promised to be a small, invite-only event with some actual facetime.

I was even more pleased when I arrived and saw it was a good mix of hardcore “power” users and regular users of the site who may have never submitted a story, but had spent months or years checking out the front page, voting up stories and clicking through.

What’s often gotten lost in the debate over the future of Digg are these users – the REAL reason Digg was successful. Power users would never have existed if it were not for the great mass of users who cared about what was hitting the front page.

And numbers don’t lie: Whether traffic to or on Digg itself is up or down isn’t really the important thing. Whether power users are still submitting in great numbers isn’t key.

Are people clicking through from the submissions on Digg to external sites? That’s the truly important figure. Those numbers had been down for a while before Version 4, but were still decent most of the time. After version 4? It fell off the cliff.

It’s increased somewhat now and again, but publishers who used to beg, borrow and steal to get posts submitted to Digg now barely even notice if something hits the front page.

And it’s those regular, everyday users who brought that traffic.

Williams is painfully aware of this, and he’s been talking to these users just as much as he’s been talking to power users.

Problem is, he was handed a site that was completely FUBAR and has had to spend an inordinate amount of time on the basics – making sure it doesn’t crash every three seconds, for example. Now that it’s stable again, he’s been working with the team on other short-term fixes: user stats are back, top news is higher up in the sidebar, the design is less cluttered again.

Bringing those regular users back, though, is a much tougher nut to crack: They were there for the news, for the stories, for the memes. There are so many other places for them to find these things now, that convincing them to come to Digg for them is harder than it once was, when Digg was a pioneer.

And a truly tell-tale sign: Last year, the Diggnation party was THE ticket. Everyone went, the crowd was shoulder-to-shoulder packed, the line snaked around the block and never ended.

This year, attendees never lacked for elbow room and you could even find some wide-open spaces

Like I said earlier, if you’d have asked me last week if Digg would still be around in a few months, I’d have said no.

Now, well …

Maybe it was the free drinks.

Maybe it was the free lumps of fried dough that were super-yummy.

Maybe it was the way Williams unflinchingly answered questions I lobbed at him like hand grenades.

Whatever it was, I’d have to say, there’s life left in the old lady  yet.

Did you notice? There seems to be a paradigm shift going on over at Digg that hearkens to the cries of users and publishers alike longing for the glory of old. It would appear that for the first time in over a year, Digg senior management is not only listening to the users, they’re acting upon what they’re hearing.

Anyone who has followed knows that I’ve been extremely critical of Digg from a few weeks before they launched V4 until very recently. Things have changed. For the first time in over 7 months, I’m strongly encouraged about Digg’s future.

Followers are also aware that I have been acutely critical of Matt Williams, the CEO who came in with a high level of promise but who we haven’t seen much of since taking over. That has changed as well and is likely the cause for the positive updates that we’ll detail below.

Does this sudden shift of opinion mean that I’m backing Digg’s actions 100%? Not yet. The skeptic in me is keeping me from jumping in feet first, but the last 3 weeks have shown clear and distinct changes in mindset, particularly in Digg’s biggest current problem: a lack of buzz.

While they aren’t harnessing their trumpets to cry forth their triumphant return to relevance, they are branching out and attempting to make the news. In the next month, we should be seeing more stories about Digg than we have in the previous three. It isn’t the good ol’ days when Jay Adelson buying a house would make a headline, but there are signs that point to Digg saying, “we’re still here, we’re still relevant, and we’re willing to fight for our user base by listening to their calls to action.”

It’s a great sign.

Changes

Digg has gotten much better at communicating their changes on the blog. We won’t rehash the recent changes too much other than to list most of them here:

1. New design – more than just a tweak, less than a redesign – that clearly took the opinions of the users gathered since the launch of V4 into account.
2. Multiple comments per story in the user profile view
3. Historical number of promoted stories and percentages (plus a minor return of the top 20 users’ list)
4. Optional on-site and email notifications when stories you submit or Digg are promoted to Top News

The two important changes are the ones that give me hope that Digg’s future is bright…

RSS Submissions are Dead. Thank You.

The biggest controversy surrounding the launch of V4 was also the primary reason that former CEOs Adelson and Kevin Rose made the shift in the first place. RSS submitting by publishers was intended to streamline the process and allow publishers to treat Digg much the same way that most treat Twitter and Facebook, bringing Digg into the crowd as one of the “big 3″ must-have social profiles for publications and celebrities.

It ended up having the exact opposite effect. By alienating and neutering their human user base, Digg effectively killed off much of the traffic that it once sent. They made it easier for publishers to submit and impossible for them to get any benefit out of submitting. It turned into a Chinese finger trap for most publishers – the more they would submit thanks to the ease of the new submission process, the less chance they had that any of these automated submissions would ever see the light of day on the Digg front page.

Many of the biggest accounts turned off their feeds and went back to the “power users” who were still able to promote quality content to the front page.

Now, the feeds are gone. Digg heard. More importantly, they listened.

How Much Traffic? This Much…

The biggest reason that Digg rose to relevance was because of the tremendous traffic that the front page sent to sites. Many would fall to the “Digg Effect” as servers would crumble under the weight of thousands accessing a page at any given moment from the Digg front page.

Digg V4 saw a mass exodus from the site as users thought it was buggy, unfair, publisher-owned, ugly… the list could go on. Bottom line was that people left, traffic dropped, and publishers such as Wired and Mashable who loved the traffic they got from Digg in V3 and the early days of V4 suddenly found themselves not getting the clicks. Even when their stories hit the front page, the traffic per story was much lower than before.

They and other sites that were supporters of Digg turned their back on them. Some even wrote negative stories about Digg and declared its demise. When you’re that big, I guess the mentality is, “Thanks for the traffic over the years, but what have you done for me lately?”

The move to publish the story-view counts is a declaration. It is a way of saying, “Hey, we’re still sending massive traffic and it’s getting bigger all the time.”

The numbers I’ve seen would back this up. Digg hit rock bottom a month ago but the traffic numbers have turned recently. While the story-view counts are somewhat inflated, representing clicks as well as views of the story on Digg (which publishers would not register as visits) it’s still a good indication of Digg’s potential prominence as well as a useful tool for users to see how much “play” a story is getting before clicking through to it.

The Future of Digg

Things are looking good, but it’s still a huge hole and they have to keep climbing. The one concern I have is that they seem to be of the mentality that they need to do what they can to get their user base back. This would be a mistake.

The users who are still on Digg want positive changes, and those are being made. The users who have left are gone. Trying to cater to them to win them back will not work. “If you love something, let it go…”

UI changes will not bring them back.

Digg must focus on the higher potential people – new users. There is currently a window open across the Internet because social media is at a tipping point. People who had never heard of Digg before because they weren’t into social media are now looking for sites that appeal to them. If Digg wants to grow, they must go after the next generation of social media users (which includes a good chunk of the entire planet).

Forget those that abandoned you. Keep your current users and go after new ones. You’re doing the right things to keep users. Now get the word out. Create buzz. Do not fall into the trap of recapturing your old base. As enticing as the strategy seems, it’s futile. They have moved on. UI changes will not get new users and won’t bring the old ones back.

Buzz, on the other hand, can go after both. Let people who have no idea what Digg is learn about the site. Let old users know that you’re making the move back to prominence and quality. Recent history has proven that changes, even major ones, do nothing if the basic PR isn’t done properly.

Two prominent examples are Mixx and MySpace. Mixx added new features a couple of years ago that were amazing, including communities, empowered moderators, and Twitter integration. They didn’t generate the buzz and they never got bigger. MySpace made a wholesale change in the way they operated but only after they lost the attention of the publishing world. They’ll be sold off for parts by the end of the year.

Focus on current and new users. Pretend like the old users that left are gone for good. If they return, great. If not, forget them.

This is an extremely delicate time for Digg. By May, they will either be all over the news as the comeback kids or they’ll be sunk. For the first time in 7 months, I’m leaning towards the prior as the likely case. It all depends on what happens next.

Update:

One nice change that is subtle but definitely more present than any time in the past is interaction by the staff. As MrBabyMan has been saying for 4 years, we want to be able to talk through issues directly and publicly, not just via email. While there’s not forum system yet, staff presence in comments is exceptionally encouraging, particularly in cases like this where issues are being worked on in real time:

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And now, a word from the CEO:

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Learn more about Digg on this social media blog.