A while ago I discussed on Collective Thoughts some of the techniques for getting your site into News syndication services like Google News. One of the main area’s I looked at was images since then a few things have changed but the importance of good images and their uses have not.

What’s a logo image?

A logo image is the initial image in a post often it takes the form of a banner or image to determine category. It’s this image that is being picked up by Social Media sites for use, before going into specifics lets take a few examples;

My Own
Category Logos:

Banners:

ProBlogger
Category

Banner

Original credit Xdjio

DoshDosh
Dosh Dosh site makes great use of Anime to create unique logo’s for each post

Lorelle WordPress Tips
Lorelle uses category images on nearly all her posts

Logo Images and Social Media Sites?

Each site handles images slightly differently but lets look at the big two Digg and StumbleUpon;
StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon has now like Digg started using images on it’s pages, both in the review page and peoples favourites. Normally these pictures are screenshots of the page but sometimes they are pictures from the page cropped.

As you can see Sebastian’s MSN crawler update bug has been cropped.

In this case the surface area of 250×165px was used in reality it’s more likely to have been 250×166.666~ or a ratio of 3:2.
The images when shown in favourites are 90×60. The ratio is determined on the width, so far I have seen 150, 175, 200, 250px as the base width.

Digg
Digg resizes images to 160×120 (4:3) or 160×160 (1:1) normally this is a straight resize but some images are showing sign of cropping.

Creating the Perfect sized image

So what would the perfect image for Social media look like size wise…

I notice a problem, with perhaps the exception of problogger community banner I don’t think any of us are close! so this leads me to…

Throw out the rule book

Images are going to be more important a striking image can make the difference between sitting at the top and bottom of the social pile. But the thing about striking images is they tend to not follow ratio rules or ideas of “perfect images” so ultimately this was perhaps my longest and most pointless post, I hope you skipped to the end first.

A few things will kill a stumble, sending no traffic and sending the page to a quiet death. I present for your horror the StumbleUpon Graveyard and how posts are dragged down to its bowels, I will even provide tips to avoid such a fate..

Reviews do have meaning

Without an initial review almost no traffic is sent, nor does your post pick up traction amongst other regular stumblers who are looking in their recent reviews as your post is not there for them to find. So how could someone stumble a site but not leave this vital review?

I don’t want to be the first

This is probably the most common way to get a post into the graveyard, the timid stumbler likes your amazing post and hits the thumbs up. They are presented with the discovery dialogue and panic! What if no one else likes it, what if I made a mistake, I best just go and cancel it! Now normally this is not a problem but it would seem some of the toolbars have a small bug counting the thumbs up and creating an entry then discounting the thumbs up but leaving the entry still intact. The result….

Problem is without testing every toolbar version on every platform we can’t be sure this is a bug but for those interested when you thumb something up the following HTTP is sent
rating=1&url=URLSubmitted&charset=UTF-8&
referer=http%3A//www.stumbleupon.com/refer.php%3F
url%3DURLSubmitted%252F&version=mozbar%203.16%20xpi&amp
;username=UserID&password=myencoded password

When you thumb up a yet undiscovered page the same initial data is sent, once StumbleUpon server realises its a new URL it requests you send data to www.stumbleupon.com/newurl.php initially this is just the rating, url and page title. You are then presented with the discovery panel and asked for tags etc. Clicking submit sends a Post request with all the information.

I think (and emphasis on the think) on some Toolbars that when you cancel it does not send a cancel signal back to StumbleUpon the result is your review is never published, your thumb is not counted but the site has been discovered and StumbleUpon is waiting for information about the initial stumbler.

Other Graveyard methods

‘SendTo’ use to be such a great thing, you could send messages to all your friends begging (sorry suggesting) great pages and we all know that this has been devalued but it still is useful to send your friends ‘SendTo’s after all a friend is much more likely to write a review which will be seen by their friends etc etc. The problem comes we often want to send people ‘SendTo’ about our great content without actually thumbing the page ourselves. StumbleUpon allows us to ‘SendTo’ on any page regardless if we actually thumbed it up so temptation is there.
Can you guess what happens if you use ‘SendTo’ on a page which has yet to be discovered and has no thumbs up…

Once again StumbleUpon has a “discovered page” i.e its in the database but with no one to associate as the first stumbler result a graveyard page.

How to avoid graveyard pages

As a page owner their is little you can do about Graveyard pages except shrug however in general:

• Only use ‘SendTo’ after the page has been discovered, and for maximum effect thumb the page first
• When you discover a page don’t stop halfway through write that review!
• Make sure you are using the latest Toolbar
• Don’t place StumbleUpon buttons on your page, while StumbleUpon provides them they effectively castrate a stumble as when some one discovers a page via these buttons they do not send that all important thumbs up

Will Stumble Grave Posts bring traffic?

A trickle but no where near what it would have done if the page had been discovered properly, for maximum traffic the Discoverer needs to have both thumbed up and Discovered the page (i.e from the toolbar) the next best thing is to discover via a button and the worst thing is to have a record in the db and no discoverer.
Can I do something?
Not really if the post proves popular and enough visitors thumb it up it will gain some traffic and more importantly may get several smaller waves in the future but these will be ghostly imitations of what it could have been.

Happy stumbling

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When StumbleUpon started integrating there results into Googles they effectively changed the way I search. If I’m presented with 10 results I am now more likely to click through to a site with a StumbleUpon review and in particular if it has a friends review.
I have an inbuilt trust of stumblers even if they are strangers over Google strange that!
Given the choice I value a Stumblers opinion more then any ranking factors
The problem of course when that trust is abused, If I do a search for credit cards I’m presented with 3 stumbleupon reviews on the front page. Now I have to ask myself are credit cards sites really interesting enough to warrant a thumbs up? Even if it’s the best deal? particularly if they have just one stumble?

Now in the above scenario the reviews were not done by my friends so I’m less likely to trust them and StumbleUpon quite rightly makes the result more discreet. But what if they had been one of my friends? Would I have clicked then?

The answer – Of course I would if I recognised the name then I would have clicked the link, sure they may have been paid to thumb it, they might be running a social media optimisation it might be there site or an affiliate link. But even if it was any of those barring the first I wouldn’t feel bad about clicking the link. My friends on the whole are not spammers even if they are optimisers I trust them.

Is trust worth more then rankings? I think so but do you?

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This is a plea to all those who would consider themselves Social Media Optimisers, Linkbaiters and Copywriters and perhaps maybe even those who consider themselves SEOs.

You are more then a sibling

Social Media Optimisation may have been born out of the need for links for search engine optimisation but that was a long time ago. Today SMOs are some of the most versatile and clever marketers in the industry brilliantly crafting pieces that regularly appear on the front page of all the major social media news sites. SMO has gone along way from SEO link baiting, it has its own set of metrics on which it determines results and its high time that SMOs took credit and stepped out of the shadow.

Search Engine Optimisation has only one metric of any note (forget PageRank and everything else) that is the position of a given site or page within a SERP. Social Media through linkbaiting has changed the way many SEOs conduct their day to day link building campaigns and many firms now have one or more people dedicated to the task of writing content to generate links.

These dedicated people not only attract links, but unique visitors, new subscribers, buyers and a whole range of other conversions they are more then a part of an SEO strategy they are part of a much larger Internet Marketing strategy.

In much the same way the first SEOs (true SEOs) were web developers who noticed that when they used html in a certain way page rankings increased, the first SMOs came from the SEO community. But you are now so much more.

SMO is not SEO2.0

Social Media is not the next version of SEO, an SMO does not optimise a page for a search engine this is a very simple and easy definition. A SMO can provide links to provide assistance in a search engine strategy but to claim that is all they do is to degrades them. I find it worrying that what is now a young vibrant industry hides behind SEO constantly attempting to compare the two it’s like trying to compare an Elephant and a Lion, both have unique and unusual traits and you would not like to be in a fight with either. To say the Lion is Elephant 2.0 is to detriment of both the Elephant and the Lion.

Accept you are different, move on

Stop hiding, stop pretending, Social Media Optimisers rock! Many of you might have been SEOs many of you traditional marketers but you are now unique and totally interesting bunch of people. What I find staggering is that you still hide behind the term SEO a term that comes in for a lot of abuse and misunderstanding I would have expect such pioneering folk to have already tried to shed the perception.

Be different but work together

I do not favour SEO over SMO or vice versa though its a question I often get asked they are different creatures and different skill set even if it might be the same person doing the jobs they are still different jobs. When SMOs work with search engine optimisers they can be a powerful combination and when search engine optimisers, social media optimisers and Internet marketers combine a site is sure to succeed.

Don’t let a minority dictate your industry future, shed the old burdens adopt your own standards and for god sake stop calling yourselves SEOs

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Social Media users are becoming the stable bread and butter users of many blogs and professional link baiter’s but few people understand how diverse (or not) these groups are recently we have been putting our efforts into looking at not only how they interact with our sites but how social media users differ from “normal” traffic.

How these test were conducted

Tracking individuals is a bit of a pain but achievable even using tools such as Google Analytics (a blog post in itself hmm there is an idea!) however luckily we are able to separate users starting point simply based on their referral information. The statistics gathered here are collected from a sample of 1000 social users (Diggers and stumblers) from 3 sites (various niches arts& craft, computing, and poetry) over a period of a month an equal number was collected of “normal” users stats to make a fair comparison (for the point of these stats norm is a visitor arriving via search engines or a non social referring site.)

Yes the pie charts are blue, it fits in with the theme, if you are colour blind please accept my apologise I can of course send you the raw data for you to turn into the colour of your choice. Otherwise their blue live with it

Social users vs the “norms”

Browsers

Interesting side note, FireFox 2 was technically the largest single version of any browser but this was more down to the fact that all its variants were counted as one version.
While very few differences a couple of things to note, Social Media users on the whole were using the latest version of their browser available they also accounted for slightly more exotic browsers as well.
We had during the study 2 Iphones User Agents identified both came from the social media side I will leave what this means for you if your interested both were referrals from Digg.
Operating Systems

Few things to note here, Social Media users again can be seen as early adopters also note the slight increase in Mac users. The highest number of Unix users came from Digg while more Vista users came through StumbleUpon then any other source. Interestingly we had a single non social media user come through via RISC-OS 5 which presumably means he is on an Iyonix which was nice to see. Overall Vista uptake was higher in Social Media users by just 0.3% at 6.8% with Windows XP still being the dominant force though down by also 0.3% an interesting direct correlation which should cheer Bill gates up a bit.

Screen Resolution

Screen Size comparison is probably one of the most useful stats, Both sets of stats show that their is still 14% of people using browser size of 800 by 600 or less. Looking at our historical trend the less then 800×600 figure is up from this time last year possibly due to the take up in hand held devices. The good news is 98% of all users had colour resolution greater then 256 its probably safe to be thinking outside of the web safe colour palette. Again Social media users are just edging ahead of main stream users in having larger screen resolution but by a very tiny margin.

Flash & JavaScript
No graphs for this one, both parties having over 90% Flash take up and 97% Javascript take up though the JavaScript enabled would appear to be down from the previous year by 0.3% this stat could be more to do with our JavaScript tracker being blocked as opposed to actual reduction.

Disclaimer - 2000 users is a very small data set, use these stats as a guide not a concrete analysis. Previous years statistics did not differentiate between social media and normal users

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It’s the question that has been keeping you awake at night, do you go for the full on Mullet or just the appearance of a Mullet with the Mulldina?
I know your problem I to have had the same sleepless nights and the answer is to use both in your social media campaign.
Please note no 80s TV idol was harmed during the writing of this post!

What’s a Mullet?

Ah its a fish, no wait sorry a hair cut, hmm no wait a social media strategy!
The idea of the Mullet strategy is to separate your linkbait from your main content and aim it squarely at social media (or pay per click) visitors. This mimics the idea of the mullet haircut short front, top and sides and a long back, or as Maki from Dosh Dosh so aptly described “business in front and party at the back “
By separating some of your content outside of your normal navigation and template you can push it to a different audience. Some reasons for doing this includes separating NSFW, massively off topic or simply trying to attract a different audience.

Mullet problems

The Mullet is not without problems to be truly successful you separate the linkbait entirely from the rest of the site but if your goal was indeed to collect links then those links are being directed at an orphan page and not assisting your other pages! The very nature of the mullet is also its biggest problem.
Also if either of your two visitor groups learn of the existence of the other it could lead to a serious reputation management problem.

Mullet vs Domain

So the question when approaching a mullet is why mullet at all, would it be simpler to set up an alternative domain and blog for your off topic linkbaiting and then simply 301 the new domain when you want the juice and are ready to embrace your linkbait?

Domains have drawbacks, apart from cost, they are time consuming and while 301 is an effective tool it is not the same as getting those links to your own site.

Mulldina

A Mulldina I’m reliably informed is a haircut that is longer on the sides then a mullet but is featherd back to give the appearance of a mullet, a pseudo mullet if you will. We can take this idea and make something that would appear on first glance to be a mullet but which allows both of your target audiences to appreciate your hard work.

This technique is only useful if you want both audiences to see the information even if you believe they will take away different things from the experience.

With the Mulldina we present the same information but with different layouts, one for our social media users and one for your regular users.

Lets take another example, my own site timnash.co.uk is very much SEO focused but I have a variety of interests ranging from photography to AI programming that I might want to include. Lets for example say I decided to release my notes on building user agents in python from a class I taught on the blog. This information would not only appeal to hardcore SEO programmers but also programmers and AI students and casual users with a passing interest in Python. In terms of traffic Digg would be an ideal target also Dzone and Stumbleupon, but my site is quite clearly geared up as an SEO site the term is plastered everywhere its clear therefore the site would need to persona’s 1 Tim Nash SEO and 2 Tim Nash Geek with 2 templates I’m ready to present two faces to the same information.

Simple Mulldina

The first option is for me to just create separate pages with different template specifically for that course, then link to them from the main blog. This is simple but is also confusing on the navigation of the site and means both audiences will find other parts of the site.

The Full Mulldina

The second option is to create 2 templates one for your existing users and one for your social media users, then based on referrer swap the template as you see fit. To make life less confusing you may wish to add a cookie so the user consistently see’s the original template for as long as the cookie remains alive.

Double Mulldina switch

Option 2 has a flaw, while a user coming from the social media site would see the mulldina template any users he sends to the site will not this could pose a potential problem. The solution is to give him a different URL then the original page. This way he passes it on to his friends and they all see the same thing, the problem with that is you have some duplicate content. You don’t want Google to crawl this second domain so the easy thing to do is to tell Google that it is in fact a 301 to the original page.

This is a form of cloaking but very much soft cloaking after all you are not actually presenting different information just a different layout. So lets go through the steps of the Double Mulldina switch.

• The original URL is submitted to social media site
• User visits from the site and is redirected based on referral info to the mulldina URL
• A cookie is set on his browser so should he wander to the original URL and not the mulldina url he will be redirected
• He passes the mulldina url to his friends, they visit cookie is set
• Google crawls original URL
• Google crawls mulldina url and is presented with a 301 to the original

Both Google and both groups are happy!

Downside of the Mulldina

Similar to the mullet if people believe you are deliberately hiding things from them or deceiving them they tend to get upset. Also referral information is not always accurate meaning people can and will slip through the net these are often that vocal group that you were trying to placate in the first place. Both of these problems can be limited if you keep the branding difference subtle and you take every step to make sure the right users pass through the right URL.

Taking the Mulldina extreme

The Mulldina strategy can be taken to virtually any lengths and fully automated so if people submit your content to Digg or similar it always uses the Digg friendly layout. Indeed while up until now I have been talking about quite drastic techniques to hide or obfuscate the original site you can use the Mulldina technique to simply optimise page layouts for different social media sites, change adverts depending on the user group etc.

The Mullet and the Mulldina are rubbish haircuts but they are a powerful and effective strategy in social media for sites that either have a particular vocal minority against them or simply want to optimise there social media linkbait to be tailored to individual social media sites.

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One of the questions we are often asked is how we track various social media sites users and their interaction with sites the answer is in a variety of ways but here is just one of the techniques we use with Google Analytics.
Please note: through out this article we use the new ga.js script rather then urchin if your still using the old code their is not much to change

Campaigns

Google Analytics offers a way to track marketing campaigns by giving them unique markers, these are normally part of a URL for example

example.com?utm_campaign=mycampaign &utm_medium=banner&utm_source=otherdomain.com

In the above example we have a global campaign the type of link it was and where it came from, this is all well and good but it requires that we create a tracking URL to submit to our social media which is not likely to happen in an “organic” submission so we need to come up with an alternate solution.

Embedding Campaign details in page

Google Analytics is pretty flexible and so allows us to embed campaign tracking information directly into a page rather then a link.

<script type="text/javascript">
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("YOURCODE");
pageTracker._setCampNameKey("mycampaign");
pageTracker._setCampMediumKey("banner");
pageTracker._setCampSourceKey("otherdomain");
pageTracker._setCampNOKey('ga_nooverride');
pageTracker._initData();
pageTracker._trackPageview();
</script>

This is great for following users arriving on landing pages for instance, but in our use we want to add this campaign information only when they arrive from specific sites and so we are going to need to capture the referral information.

Social Referrals

Using PHP we can get referral information about how the user arrived on the page using HTTP_REFERER this interrogates packets sent by the browser for referral information. This technique is not hugely accurate users can manipulate such information and some browsers don’t send any referral information at all. But for what we are doing which is taking snapshots of social media users it will do the job perfectly. Once we have where they come from we need to compare it to our list of social media sites and then add our tracking details as needed.

/* Social Media Campaign organiser
For more info: http://blog.venture-skills.co.uk/2007/12/22/social-media-tracking-ga/
By Tim Nash */
/*Gather Referer info and find domain*/
$url = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']; // Get referer string - remember not accurate!
$domain = parse_url($url, PHP_URL_HOST); // Set domain as the Host of the referring URL
/*Select social media sites to track from*/
$social = array("stumbleupon.com","digg.com","mixx.com","sphinn.com");//Set Social sites array
/*Set campaign if a social media site referal*/
if (array_search($domain,$social)) { //search the array
echo "
pageTracker._setCampNameKey('social_media');
pageTracker._setCampMediumKey('".$domain."');
pageTracker._setCampSourceKey('".$url."');
pageTracker._setCampNOKey('ga_nooverride');
"; //add campaign details
}
?>

So in the above example code we have created a campaign called social media, the medium is set as the domain of the social media site and the source the exact url. You could also add an ID if you have several pages which are part of the same linkbait campaign.

Complete code

var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ?
"https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost +
"google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));

var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("YOURCODE");
<?php
/* Social Media Campaign organiser
For more info: http://blog.venture-skills.co.uk/2007/12/22/social-media-tracking-ga/
By Tim Nash */
/*Gather Referer info and find domain*/
$url = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']; // Get referer string - remember not accurate!
$domain = parse_url($url, PHP_URL_HOST); // Set domain as the Host of the referring URL
/*Select social media sites to track from*/
$social = array("stumbleupon.com","digg.com","mixx.com","sphinn.com");//Set Social sites array
/*Set campaign if a social media site referal*/
if (array_search($domain,$social)) { //search the array
echo "
pageTracker._setCampNameKey('social_media');
pageTracker._setCampMediumKey('".$domain."');
pageTracker._setCampSourceKey('".$url."');
pageTracker._setCampNOKey('ga_nooverride');
"; //add campaign details
}
?>
pageTracker._initData();
pageTracker._trackPageview();

Understanding Reports

Rather then explaining how to access your campaign reports I’m simply going to point you to the expert at Epikone who have written a fantastic series on using campaigns (though never to track social media site users) and it would be silly to replicate their work to a lower standard.

What else can you do

The above code is pretty simple to modify, to tag users with a cookie, to redirect certain user groups and with a couple of minor changes can be used with clickheat maps or any other analytics program. One option is to uniquely identify users across your analytical scripts but be careful to declare such activities in your privacy policy and your P3P document.

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Quick note to say stage 1 of the move is now over please say hello to our new address

http://blog.venture-skills.co.uk

This is just the first part of a large move so hold on tight and enjoy the ride

Something to think about for a moment;
If you truly are a superstar in the Web2.0 scene you need groupies and copy cats, Mybloglog has groupies but not that many copy cats (excluding BlogCatalog but I wouldn’t call them copy cats).

The Mybloglog principle is simple at its heart is a basic tacking and profiling system but where are the scripts? If you want to build a Digg clone you are spoiled for choice for a voting system from Pligg to our Drupal Hack through a dozen others, Social Bookmarking no problem literally hundreds of scripts out there to chose from.

But if you want to create a MyBlogLog clone absoultely nothing! Not sure what this says in many ways the number of clones is an indication of how popular an idea is, so looking at the lack of clones should we conclude that MyBlogLog is on a losing streak?

Which brings me onto a separate subject Yahoo where is that API?

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Mailing lists, IM groups stumble me stumble you forum posts, do any of these schemes to maximise social media traffic actually work? Well lets find out…
How we do the tests
Myself and a team of caring slaves (researchers) pour over logs provided to us by website owners as well as our own sites, we submit and follow stumbles and Diggs as well as normal traffic. We then average out the traffic over several sites to create the graphs. Each graph is based on a minimum of 10 sites averaged. To try and minimise any bias we don’t include sites/posts related to social media or out of niche for the site. While we try to minimise as many variables as possible we are talking about live web sites which we don’t always control and are not always designed as part of our experiments in other words take the graphs with a pinch of salt and if your results are different don’t blame us!

Note from Tim: Every post is different and every mailing list, forum and IM system work in different ways we are not saying your group does not work! Think of this like a network penetration test we have used well known techniques to test how two large social media services cope nothing more.

Normal traffic

StumbleUpon
There is no such thing as “normal stumble” so we have to take an average, to make life easier we discount stumbles that didn’t get more then 3 stumblers thumbing up and we also discounted stumbles that did not have a peak spike of more then 100 visitors within 3 days. We use the same basis for all our stumble graphs.

Digg
Digg is a little different for each of our tests we measure which had more front page results on average our normal pages or our assisted pages. We also looked at bury rates, these are the overall average of a story being buried regardless of if it reaches the front page. Note: Buries are very topic dependant politics, social media are two topic that suffer from the “bury brigade” a group of Diggers who bury any associated topics as such getting a post from those niches on to the front page is much harder then normal.
Average Bury rate: 12%

Forum Stumble me Stumble you

If you visit any large forum you will come across the “Stumble me and I will Stumble you” posts this is perhaps the open face of assisting social media. If you are a paranoid sort of soul you would immediately be looking over the shoulder after all if you found this forum what’s to stop others?
StumbleUpon

Light blue is the forum posts the darker our normal

Digg

On average normal posts had a better chance of making the Digg home page then Forum assisted posts.
Average Bury rate: 26.4%

Mailing List

With the support of 3 mailing lists we tracked nearly a 100 users, not all voted on all stories all the time and one of the features that make mailing lists so useful is they are not easy to spot people are voting over a period of time and from lots of locations, but does it work?
StumbleUpon

Light blue is the mailing list assisted posts the darker our normal

Digg

On average normal posts had a better chance of making the Digg home page then mailing list assisted posts.

Average Bury rate: 13%

IM Group

“hi Ya any chance you can give x a push” we all do it me included but what if you did this on a wide scale rather then just the person you are currently talking to. We tracked nearly 90 people through IM as we asked for stumbles and Diggs.
StumbleUpon

Light blue is the instant message assisted posts the darker our normal

Digg

On average Instant message assisted posts had a better chance of making the Digg home page then non assisted posts.

Average Bury rate: 28.5%
Note: This is a scary statistic but we may have a reason, it like every thing else is down to our friends we may well have had some rather anti social friends and never knew it.
UPDATE: I came across an article on IM epidemic within Digg.

Conclusions

None of our assisted stumbles did as well as being left alone though the use of instant messages does appear to give an additional boost but damages the total number of visitors over a long term. Likewise mailing list and Forum posts don’t show any gains with dig, an interesting statistic was the high bury ratio for forum posts could this be Digg auto burying based on referrer? Of all our methods only the use of instant messages showed an increase chance of hitting the front page, the reason would be the speed issue which is still a major factor in the Digg algorithm however it showed an alarming bury ratio as well over a quarter of instant message Diggs were being buried that’s a very scary statistic.

Ultimately the answer is assisting stumbles and Diggs doesn’t help if your content was going to work it will work, if it wasn’t it won’t. Of course every so often an assisted post will make it popular but the problem is people will associate the popular status with the assistance rather then with the quality of the post.

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