With all this chatter about people asking each other for Diggs, Spinns, Del.icio.us saves, Reddit votes and…Propellers, wouldn’t it be nice to have a social news site that was unsusceptible to gaming? With that said let’s take a look at Digg and combine its current model with new anti-gaming ideas.

1. First we need to look at how Digg votes are attained:

• Inside the Digg system: via natural user interaction and by ‘shouting’ to your friends
• Outside the Digg system: via sending the story URL to potential voters via IM and/or email

For this new system to work, we would have to filter which votes were attained inside the system alone. If a user were to access the story URL from an outside referral address, the vote wouldn’t count.

2. What if someone just creates multiple user accounts with unique IP addresses?

You could deter this tactic by ignoring votes that come from users who enter in a story’s URL directly without first accessing the main site. In order for a vote to be considered, there would have to be evidence of a bread crumb trail or a referral address within the system. If the user is on www.domain.com and enters in www.domain.com/story and there’s no link on www.domain.com to www.domain.com/story, the site would ignore the vote.

3. What if someone arrives on the site, logs in, searches for the story’s title, and then votes?

Voting using this method would work, but the weight of this vote would be less than 1. More like .25.

Implementing simple voting caps like this might ensure the integrity of the content’s actual popularity. The Digg community already does a pretty bang-up job at separating the wheat from the chaff but even if the content is valuable or interesting and deserving of votes, it can still be gamed. Once a story goes popular then a mob mentality sets in. People think that since a story has received (X) votes in (X) time then it must be something that deserves their attention and probably a vote. Often, this exaggerated popularity can push even mediocre content to a more prominent position within the site.

However, preventing the exaggeration of a story’s popularity on Digg could turn off some users. Social sites that gain enormous popularity seem to have a good balance at appealing to both the average end user and those who wish to influence them. If the influencers could no longer leverage a site, traffic might drop, even while the improved gauge of actual popularity could bring more/new users to the site.

Wikipedia is a site that is extremely difficult to employ for marketing purposes and is not the medium of choice for most influencers. Nonetheless, Wikipedia was receiving 917,000 hits per day as long ago as October 2004. Wikipedia was built on user participation and our need to document knowledge. Because of this the perceived integrity and value, Wikipedia enjoys great popularity.

Overall, improving the filters that maintain voting integrity within Digg may not only prevent gaming, but could also increase traffic by boosting the site’s perceived value.

Speakers
Lise Broer - “Duova”, Administrator, Wikipedia
Jonathan Hochman, Founder/President, Hochman Consultants
Matt McGee - SEO Manager, Marchex
Stephan Spencer - Found/President, Netconcepts
Don Steele - Director of Digital & Enterprise Marketing, Comedy Central

Matt McGee is speaking first

Matt is going to discuss Yahoo Answers
More about expertise and knowledge, not so much for selling products
It is a simple and incredibly busy Q&A site
There is a constant stream of questions and answers, very busy
there are friending aspects
you can create a profile page with a link to your own website
links are no followed
Yahoo answers is for traffic building not link building
21 million users in the US
95 million users Globally
Yahoo Answers condones marketing your products or services
As long as you provide a helpful answer, all is well
Spam is not okay

Benefits of Yahoo Answers
referral traffic
lowest bounce rate through Yahoo Answers
your answers will be indexed
crawl depth is great

How to use Yahoo Ansers?
find questions you want to answer
They have RSS feeds for every category on the site
They have a search box on Yahoo Answers
You can filter your search by the number of answers or date
make sure you sign your name when you are leaving a question or an answer
Lastly, do not Spam

Next up is Jonathan Hochman

Jonathan is a Wikipedia admin
The amount of wiki traffic is huge
Use wikipedia as a poll media

Marketers…please do not spam the system (don’t be a dick…exact words)

Top newbie mistakes are:
don’t use promotional usernames
don’t make copyright violations - pictures and content
no conflict of interest editing, don’t write about yourself or things you are close to you

You can get blacklisted for spamming Wikipedia
all domains that are blacklisted are made publicly available
SEs use the data to tweak their algos
A Google employee actually spammed Wikipedia and their IP was recorded
The IP recorded will not be from the company’s firewall but actually the specific computer within the network

Your audience does the marketing for you
content spreads virally because of loose copyrights
participating within Wikipedia can improve your reputation

Next to speak is Stephan Spencer

Getting your wiki edits to stick
develop a profile that has street cred
add edits that are cleaning up spam not creating it
fix typos
practices that are clearly non-commercial are best
you can receive barn star awards for doing a good job at moderating
age and histroy of your account matter
over time you could become an admin
incorporate content edits when adding a link. It makes it harder to revert your edit
communicate with the main editor of the article before adding an external link that you think is valuable but could be looked at with suspicion and removed
when you add links, if you add them as references instead of adding them to the external links section they are more likely to stick

Creating brand new entries
be logged in with an account that has a solid contribution history
make sure there is no connection between you and the article’s subject
have the subject of the article weigh in via the talk page rather than making edits themselves
watch the page so you can be alerted to an AfD nomination or reversion of your work
use lots of references, particularly ones that are from mainstream media sources
references serve two purposes
1. external links that will stick
2. establish notability, you have to have great articles in the media that you can reference in the Wiki

Getting over the notability hurdle
press release mentions do not help establish notability
use google’s new archive search for finding reference articles
an article with just a passing quote isn’t good enough
get your PR firm to help you land an article even if it is with a small newspaper that profiles your company

Protecting your investment
when admins and the new page partol see new usernames and page creation which are blatantly commercial, they are ordered to “shoot’em on sight” - Brad Patick, Wikipedia
make firends, you’re going to need them
Watch the pages you have an interest in
Don’t just rely on the wikipedia watch function; use a tool that emails you when changes are made (trackengine.com, changenotes.com, urlywarning.net, changedetect,com)

Playing the game
internal politics, reversion wars, ego trips, indiscriminate removal of commercial content
www.wikitruth.info can detect changes
There are other tools that can detect edits. Wiki scanner is one of them.

Next to speak is Don Steele

“Comedy Central and Wikipedia, a match made in heaven”

How we execute digital marketing
DVDs & other biz
Mobile
Wikis
Social Networks
Podcasts
Email
Viral

South Park has 185 Wikipedia pages
Bono was mentioned in a Wikipedia edit pertaining to a recent South Park episode
Bono’s Wikipedia page is now referencing South Park

Traffic volume is great
Content is highly referenced and referred to on Wikipedia
Wikipedia has become a relevant traffic driver to comedycentral.com

Comedy Central started editing pages
Wikipedia warmed them not to
Comedy Central editing was a conflict of interest
Now Comedy Central has a great relationship with the Wiki administration
Follow the rules and don’t be a dick

Next to speak is Lise Broer - Wikipedia Admin
Suggests that all companies should handle Wikipedia entries the way that Don from Comedy Central does
Lise has 18,000 edits and has been working with Wikipedia for around a year
Lise sees a lot of people making wikipedia mistakes
15% of what people say on Wikipedia can ruin careers
Wikipedia is not Facebook or MySpace
She’s now talking about Virgil Griffith who created the Wiki Scanner

Lise is talking about a commercial Wiki edit that went awry
Some guy from Idaho Falls was spamming Wikipedia over and over and denying it
He was selling Tea Tree oil
He tried to login using a new ip and new username
However the new user name was IdahoFallz
Lise references Wikipedia: WikiProject Spam

People are constantly trying to spam Wikipedia
Said something about angry mastodons