I was recently hired as a social media marketing consultant to promote their online stores. Their main store acheived 900% growth in 2007 and was listed as one of Inc Magazines fastest growing small companies. After reading a book about social media marketing, the owner wanted to experiment with some of the strategies and assigned me $500 and one month to use social media marketing to improve the SEO on his store's blogs. I proposed a laundry list of ideas, and after a lengthy discussion we narrowed it down to three ideas:

1. Develop power Digg and StumpleUpon accounts and promote companies blog content
2. Build solid blog rolls and network with relevant blogs or websites
3. Develop company twitter accounts for each store to become a resource for customers as well as push visitors to the blog content

Gaming Digg is an often discusses social media practice and I figured it wasn't too hard. I researched the topic for hours, and my initial conclusion was that it's no longer worth the time-investment. A year ago, the Digg community was significantly smaller, and there were less "power users". I read several interviews by the top Digg users, and read as they discusses their decrease in influence throughout 2008, and how the promotion power of Digg is being spread so thin. One to two years ago, a power account could be established after a month of 15-20 solid daily submissions, but in todays community requires 2-3 months of skilled content promotion. The method for gaming Digg is so sought-after, and attempted so many times it is no longer achievable. Also the ratio of content promotion between Digging other content versus your own is likely around 1:100. A once targeted social media practice has become diluted, and now the only cost effective method for significant Digg traffic is to unfortunately purchase influential Diggs through existing power users.