So I’m trying out the new Digg site. I got an invite and I’m playing with it now. They even have a nifty auto submit feature which is why there is a random set of letters and numbers on the next line. Let’s see if the changes are enough to save it from fatal collapse  under its own user base…

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Related posts:

1. Is Digg Completely Irrelevant to Gen Y?

I’ve written a great post for the UPIU Blog on my methodology for managing the social media presence of both UPIU and the Office of Student Media.

Glittering promises to transform you into a social media powerhouse overnight are scams. Focusing on a long-term method to grow your social media presence, though, is a good idea.

Many groups, including college journalism outlets, are strategizing on the best ways to use social media to expand their brands. I have my own strategy for increasing followers, finding people, increasing hits and helping others, which I use daily at my job as Technology Manager for George Mason University’s Office of Student Media. I’ve made an acrostic for the strategy: MEGA.

MEGA Social Media:

1. Monitor related topics
2. Engage the audience
3. Grow your coverage
4. Be Active

A surprising number of folks fail to do all of these things. So I figure a bit of expansion might be helpful.

Read more at UPIU’s Building the J-Future.

Related posts:

1. How One University Uses Social Media to Help Make Student Votes Count.
2. Old vs New Media – Creative Commons, Wikipeidia and Post Scraping – What is Grand Theft Content?
3. Online Distribution for New Media

Taking a look at popular posts among my peer group (college students, aged 17-25) shows that few of them share the same type of popularity on Digg that they do on other networks. Likely because these students have little interest in using Digg, even for a quick upvote.

To put it simply, Digg has voted itself out of the social ecosystem. The proof is right there on many of the stories I’ve been looking at lately.

Just look at Huffington Post’s first headline news story in their college section. The article is on student debt, perhaps the one topic universally important to the college-age market segment.

“Share Your Story — Majoring in Debt” was immensely popular, with 579 Facebook shares and 1,389 Tweets. The comment section on the site received 4,316 replies. But how many Diggs are there? 16.

This is clearly not a question of interest in the content. If all the people who had Facebooked and Tweeted the article had bothered to log on to Digg and vote, it would have blown up. But they didn’t. The reason is that Gen Y just doesn’t care about Digg.

The Digg community has recognizably been gamed by those with large networks and caters to a very niche user base, interested mostly in tech topics and anything that can amuse them. The irritating Digg bar doesn’t help either.

The perception (right or wrong) of the Digg community as clique-ish doesn’t sit well with college-age students who are aiming to build their own brands. I know very few of my fellow students who are fans of Digg. Those who are fall into that niche category of tech-addicted ultra-geeks.

In the meantime, the ever-growing community of regular students jumping onto social media have little interest in the mysteries of Digg mastery, instead following content where they live, on Facebook or Twitter.

The population growing up with the internet has no interest in Digg.

While a huge number of upvotes may be beneficial for an article, it is no longer representative of popularity. Instead, the shares of stories through the tools people use every day are what matter.

I, for one, wave a happy goodbye to an antiquated tool.

Related posts:

1. Wait, So Facebook Dictates Reality?
2. Trying out the new Digg

I attended another great DC Media Makers event tonight. There were two presentations, one on Crisis Camp, and one on the video blog project Why Tuesday. Both were excellent. Worth noting were some fascinating GPS and QR projects. Also, the Why Tuesday video, which I hadn’t heard of before, was just fantastic.

Sorry you missed it? Well there are some Qik videos, by Dave Saunders, of DC Media Makers right here:

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2. Gore Verbinski Talks About Video Games
3. Link Roundup: The importance of blogs and blog-like interactions for journalism sites

So there’s a little website up that lets you calculate your personal brand online. I’m not sure how it works, but it looks pretty nifty.

Apparently I’m pretty good, because I got this:

I’ve yet to hear about anyone getting a bad grade on this site, so I’m curious to find out what other people got as a result.

Related posts:

1. Quick: Foster on-blog discussion using FriendFeed