read one of my favorite books, “The Cluetrain Manifesto”. Read Anvil’s Cluetrain Manifesto Book Review. The premise of his recommendation is that Cluetrain was the first generation of SMO and link baiting. Todd’s first step when setting out to market to social media sites and networks is to think of the hook, which can be: attacks, humorous, contrarian views, news, resources, ego driven, or promoting new files like pictures or movies. Next step is to think about the title with the goals of getting votes, traffic, a rankings boost, new RSS subscribers, trust and mindshare. He actually recommends coming up with 10 titles based on the type of hook. Wow, that’s a lot of titles. But I guess practice makes perfect (just ask my piano teacher from grade school days – I didn’t practice and wasn’t perfect in any way). Some tips before launch day include: cache your content, host images on an alternated host, use a trusted account, be prepared to work your butt off for the 24 hour period since Digg has a limited window, don’t always submit to the same sites, and be prepared to beg for links – the new term for this is “Digg Begging”.

Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOmoz gave an overview of the benefits of participating and creating profiles on social networking and media sites. Benefits include: reaching additional audiences outside primary group, controling and marketing your brand by participating in the conversation, managing your reputation, building links, driving traffic, and creating mindshare. He then gave a comprehensive run down of the most popular of sites, listed in order of most important in Rand’s mind: YouTube, StumbleUpon (which is the #2 traffic referral to SEOmoz’s site, even ahead of Google!), Wikipedia, Yahoo! Answers, Digg, Yelp (for local businesses), Reddit, LinkedIn, Flickr, Delicious, Facebook, MySpace (yep, ahead of Facebook!), Craig’s List (Best of List), Amazon, Technorati, Newsvine, Sphinn, CitySearch, Helium, Wikihow, SecondLife (bottom of the list for a reason: it’s a game and will never be that big. Rand mentioned how Coca Cola spent $200k to build a presence there and didn’t get much out of that besides “branding” which can’t really be measured), and Twitter.

Neil Patel, CTO of ACS was up next to talk about leveraging Digg and StumbleUpon. The first step is to participate by submitting stories and news well before you submit content on yourself or your clients, next is to befriend people and create a network of trusted friends who can then help you submit and vote on stories. Finally, know when to submit – don’t do it on the weekends or late evenings because your story won’t be seen by as many people as during the weekdays. So what not to do? Don’t outwardly promote yourself, add biased information, spam the sites, or break community rules. He also recommended against paying for votes.