How to Win the Hearts of Digg Users (and All Other Social Media Communities)

Social Media users are emotionally connected to their communities. After visiting and using the social website for some time, some users naturally feel a sense of belonging within the community.

Although they are separate individuals, social media users gradually assimilate into the collective while developing in-group solidarity. This is when inside-jokes, memes and self-referential commentary starts to develop and spread from within the community.

This discourse influences the actions of other users. These behavioral displays and community-specific prejudices initially begin among established users, before transplanting itself within newer entrants into the social media community.

These newbies or beginners observe the actions of these users and some will adopt the same characteristics to fit in. Others will ignore the unwritten protocol and will participate in the social media community in their own way.

Here’s the catch: To win the hearts of an entire social media community, you need to tap into the vein of everything that matters to them, both individually and collectively. Your mastery of the community’s memes/preferences must demonstrate not only your understanding of their interests but your loyalty to the hive.

This is not an easy task to do. Viral marketers have tried to exploit social media channels like Digg by creating and disseminating relevant content through influencers, active social media users with a strong reputation and community commitment. If well crafted to suit the interests of diggers, popularity is achievable.

But viral content of this sort is still divisive. No matter how brilliant, you are only playing the interests of a segment and not the whole. Your story will be adored by some and scorned by others. It’s inevitable. So how do you tap the collective and reach the entire community as much as possible, at the same time?

The answer is simple. Engage both the community brand and the collective persona through the use of referential data that is commonly known by all social media users. In the case of Digg.com, the community brand is ‘Digg’ and the individual/collective persona is ‘Digger/s’, a title which refer to the audience and the users of the website.

These two labels are unanimously familiar to all users without exception. There are no topical barriers to overcome. Each user is naturally interested in content which references the community brand (Digg) and the individual or collective persona (digger/s) because they are actively engaged with the social media channel.

So in order to appeal to and attract the attention of all (or most) social media users, you’ll need to leverage the all-familiar brand of the community site while addressing the collective/individual persona directly. Talk to everyone by talking through an identity that everyone instinctively relates to.

This is the way you win their hearts or at the very least their attention or support.

Kina Grannis and Gotta Digg: Viral Marketing Through Digg.com

Here is a brilliant example of what I’ve mentioned above. Kina Grannis is an American singer participating in Crash The Super Bowl, a contest to determine which singer/band will get an Interscope recording contract and a chance to air a 60 second music video during the Superbowl.

User votes determine which artist gets to advance to the final round and the current round of voting ends on December 31st 2007. So the more votes she’s able to get, the better her chances of moving into the final selection process. To have a chance of winning, Kina needed votes. The more the merrier.

What Kina did was to write a song about Digg and perform it while recording it on a video, which was then submitted to Digg last night with the title ‘Cute Girls Sing Awesome Song About Digg’. As you can probably imagine, the song did incredibly well and got to the Digg frontpage in 1 hr and 12 minutes.

The video was located on her blog post, which includes a plea for votes from the digg users who visited her page to view the video, which you can see below:

It also includes the lyrics for the song, which I’ve included below. Note specifically the use of inside references which are familiar to all (or most) Digg users:

When I’m feeling lazy, at school or when I work
I sneak to my computer, and then I like to shirk
I don’t go online shopping, I don’t email with my mom
I open up my browser, and go to digg-dot-com

Chorus: Gotta digg, gotta digg, gotta digg
Gotta make this story big!
Did you hear that awful sound?
Another server’s down!

I always dig up Apple, and I bury Microsoft
But when I said I was a girl, all the diggers scoffed
And when I see those stories about Senator Ron Paul
I don’t even RTFA; I just digg them all!

Chorus: Gotta digg, gotta digg, gotta digg
Gotta make this story big!
Did you hear that awful sound?
Another server’s down!

The fanboys can be tiresome, they always are outspoken
And if you’re listening Kevin Rose, the comment system’s broken!
I know digg isn’t perfect, but be thankful for what we’ve got
It’s just like daddy always says: “At least it’s not Slashdot!!!”

Chorus: Gotta digg, gotta digg, gotta digg
Gotta make this story big!
Did you hear that awful sound?
Another server’s down!

The response by diggers was largely favorable. Almost all of them loved the song and marveled at how girls like Kina seemed to be a fan of Digg. A user even called it a nerdgasm and most thought Kina was cute and had a great voice.

The story was then picked up by Techcrunch and Techmeme, which probably helped the video to spread even further. At the moment now, the video has over 70,000 views and is on the second page of Youtube’s Most Viewed Today list.

It might not have the traction needed to advance higher on Youtube in order to get more views but things could change if the video spreads fast enough. All this must be rather exciting for Kina, who developed an web reputation through this stunt.

Viral marketing 101, isn’t it? This actual scenario has all right elements in place for success. While the video was angled towards the Digg audience, it shows how easily social media communities of all sorts can be influenced by appealing to their emotional engagement with the community brand and collective/individual persona.

Something to keep in mind the next time you want to disseminate ideas or content in order to get the attention of social media communities. Now if you have a MySpace account, you might want to go cast a vote for Kina. ^_^

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