Collective Thoughts

Who vs. How Many?

That was the content of one of Seth Godin’s recent blog posts, the title was:-

The more people you reach the more likely it is that you’re reaching the wrong people

It was a timely though very short post, I was still in the “collective thoughts” mode one usually is at the start of the new year, though mine was somewhat delayed by moving to a new house, and various internet connection difficulties.

My year really didn’t start until mid-January

Back in November I went through some of the strategic planning I would at least consider for social media marketing, in fact any online marketing.

Whilst Seth’s thinking in many ways defines niche marketing, what I was looking for was to reassess my niche and I came up with my own short form.

Customer vs Peers

This offers in many ways a perplexing contradiction - the content and social media interaction that might widen your reach by attracting peers at the same time might not be suitable for your customers. The content is effectively self-serving, not customer orientated.

The social media interaction might also be self-serving if it is centred around your peer group.

As an example it might be wrong for the BBC, Washington Post or New York Times to promote Digg, when their customers might find a better user experience on Propeller, Mixx or Delicious.

Which social news site should Microsoft promote?

I have made similar tough decisions recently - my most active social media activity unfortunately was not a good match for many of my customers, and many of my peers. It was self-serving.

Redefined Goals

By in depth metrics analysis of historical content, it is possible to determine which content was most suitable for your customers - a customer orientated approach to content development ultimately rewards the “who” and not the “how many”.

What is more valuable, a recommendation from a current or potential customer, or from a peer or professional colleague?

One strange though understandable phenomenon - customer orientated content seems more likely to attract links from customers than peers.

Posted in social media | 2 Comments »

Justice Reigns: Stumble Troll BANNED by SU

Today aimClear contacted the FBI regarding StumbleUpon cyber-harassment incidents, as they deal with Internet harassment. Justice Rules. We got one of the worst StumbleTrolls BANNED by complaining to SU.

Over the last few weeks, there’s been quite a sequence of exchanges between Internet Marketing types and StumbleTrolls.

A StumbleTroll is a social media dreg that follows authentic people around with death slogans and pseudo neo-Nazi meanderings of hate, evil, and terrible poetry. (more…)

Posted in Rants | 45 Comments »

What if Social Media were a Disorder?

As I was waiting with my son in his Doctor’s waiting room I started reading one of the many pamphlets that they had sitting around. I happened to pick up one of the pamphlet’s titled Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. I smiled as I read it as I always felt that I was obsessed with Social Media. And, even though I haven’t been diagnosed with OCD I suppose having it might be a possibility. That possibility got me thinking… What if Social Media were a disorder?

And, the inside of the Pamphlet would read….

What is Social Media?

Social Media is the interaction of people on the Web. Unlike traditional media such as newspapers, TV, magazines, Books, Cds, and radios where there is no interaction between others… Social Media is human conversations via Internet Communities.

What are the Symptoms?

The use of, but not limited to, one or more of the following:

• Blogging
• Instant Messaging
• Participating in Forums & Message Boards
• Photo Sharing & Video Sharing
• Podcasts
• Social Networking
• Commenting on Blogs

What Causes Social Media Disorder?

The Need for:

• More Traffic
• Incoming Links
• Visability as an Expert in your Field
• Moving up in the Search Engines
• Interaction between Business Owners and Potential Customers
• Branding your Products Name / Business Name
• Passing the word around about your product or Service.

How is Social Media Diagnosed?

An Increase in one or more of the following:

• Traffic increase illustrated on Website’s Stat Counter (Visitors, Pages, Time Spent)
• Your Website being Mentioned Online
• Incoming Links / Trackbacks
• Increase in RSS Feed Subscribers
• Improvement in SERPS
• Sales Increased
• Comments Increased

Treatment

Once you have caught Social Media it is a Chronic Disorder. There is no way to rid it from your system. Unfortunately, there is no cure for Social Media. Fighting Social Media is extremely painful. The best treatment is to learn as much as you can about Social Media, so you can accept it and learn to live with it.

Posted in social media | 18 Comments »

Defining Social Metrics

I read a nice little post by Brent Csutoras I had been pointed towards it by Brian who is quoted within. I have been preparing a post on Mixx since before Christmas for Collective Thoughts so was keen to see another perspective, I was pleasantly surprised but also a little concerned.

Sheer Volume of worthless traffic is still worthless

How you define worthless of course is the key. The argument put forward by Brent is that Mixx simply doesn’t have a critical mass (or activity) to produce enough traffic to make it worth while for marketers. He quotes some stats that are pretty close to mine in terms of sheer visitor numbers to his site and their he stops. The problem is that sheer volume is not a useful metric indeed in many respects rather then being a goal the traffic itself should be considered the cost let me try to explain.

The cost of Volume

Every unique visitor costs a small amount of money, they are taking up bandwidth and resources, the more pages they view the more they cost. A well designed site has a set of “Call to actions” be it to buy a product, subscribe to the RSS feed or comment on the post each of these provide a small ROI how much this return is depends on the action. Even if the return has no financial return it still has a cost implication.
Example
Joe has a blog he has two calls to action 1) advertisement (he wants people to click the links) and 2) Subscribe to RSS
His hosting costs and monthly bandwidth mean each visitor per page costs him approx 1c.
Joe gets 100 visitors - the cost of these visitors is $1 and 1 person clicks an advert he recoups $0.30 Joes total cost is $0.70 if he values RSS subscription at a $0.5 and some two people subscribe then Joe has a ROI of $0.30

Lets say Joe gets to the front page of Digg and has 10k visitors a total cost of $100 he picks up 100 subscribers and 20 people click the ads his total cost is $94 financially and a ROI (including subscribers) -$44

Now I made those numbers up, but the point I want to get across is that everything has a ROI which should be included in any metric. If you sell an Ebook which is it better to have 10 visitors of which 1 buys the book or 10k visitors of which 1 buy the book.

Social media in particular can drive vast amount of traffic with little or no effort but why would you want this traffic what was the point?

Every Goal has to be measured to have success

Working out success on pure visitor numbers is like working out your crop size based on locust population. If your site never had any set goals then it can not have any measured success, to measure success you need to first define your goals and how much reward such goals bring.
In my above example I used financial costs and rewards simply because it is the one thing most people understand but a cost and reward can be far more wide ranging. A good example of a non fiscal metric for blogs is Avinash Kaushik 6 methods for measuring blog success if your interested in looking at these on your own blog Joost has written a plugin at Collective Thoughts we have been using it for a while though it will take a few months before its data will be really useful.

Traffic is good, conversions are better

I love stats and I love social media I watch with joy when I see thousands of visitors on my site through the likes of StumbleUpon regardless of any goals so it seems hypocritical to suggest that traffic doesn’t matter but ultimately beyond a childish fascination it does not matter. What matters is if that traffic converted and achieved my goals.

Is Mixx ready for marketers peddling their wares probably not, is it ready for Link Builders hoping to get their stories in front of some of the most forward thinking people in social media quite possibly.

Posted in productivity, social media | 13 Comments »

Social Media Ninja Winners!

Ladies and Gentlemen the votes have been counted the judges have been arguing, the Collective Thoughts ethics committee was called. Smoke was seen rising, had a new Ninja been selected?
The standard was very high and the participants came from all walks and backgrounds, some were well known already on the social media stage others were coming to the fore. Some were desperate for the title others more laid back.

Finally it was down to two, one had the most votes through aggressive marketing (social begging) the other a smaller voice but still impressive. What were we to do but choose both!

I present you with not one but two Social Media Ninjas for 2008 each ninja wins a unique prize suited to them as well as the right to call themselves social media ninja and to show of their new found status with the Social Media Ninja badge.

BartTheBear (aka Leonard)

love him or hate him, Leonard garnered the most votes. Leonard now holds the title of Social Media Ninja 2008

Leonard’s Bio: Why I chose “BartTheBear” - My real last name is Bartholomew. One of my favorite animal movie stars is Bart The Bear from “The Edge” with Anthony Hopkins. I am 6 foot 6 inches tall and built like a bear. I am told that I snore like one too. That is if bear actually snore when they hibernate. The last time I checked I about got my face tore off. I don’t necessarily like the conotation of “being a bear”, but it sure draws a lot of attention and is a lot of fun when it comes to blogging and representing myself in the social media sites.

SEOSmarty (aka Ann)

Ann also received a good amount of votes and definitely seemed to be a crowd favourite. Ann will share the title of Social Media Ninja with Leonard

Ann’s Bio: Well, I am 24, coming from Russia or Ukraine (as you prefer ). I started as an affiliate manager for a celebrity poster e-shop, and that’s where I learned the basics of Internet marketing. I was then hired as a freelance SEO consultant. I started my own business about a year ago once I came to US. My company is really small (only 6 employees) but that’s great to be independent though! I started blogging and marketing at SM about a month ago, and got really excited about that. This resulted in a number of posts on my blog dedicated to social media rather than SEO - just because I can’t stop writing about that!

Congratulations to our winners we hope you enjoyed it and those who didn’t win will come back next year to challenge for the title Social Media Ninja 2009!

Posted in social media ninja | 9 Comments »

Social Media Ninjas - Unite!

Wow, everyone! Thanks so much for your great entries to the Social Media Ninja Contest!

Although we said last time that we would only be advancing the top 10 to the next round, we felt that all 13 that participated should move on.

Edit:  Here are the contest rules:

1 - Please only vote for one candidate.
2 - Votes must be received by Tuesday, January 8th, 2008 at midnight GMT.
3 - Candidates cannot vote for themselves.
4 - The decision of the Collective Thoughts team is final.

So here they are, folks. Which of the following should go on to become a Social Media Ninja?

TheGypsy (aka Dave)
Best Known at: Sphinn
Ninja Entry

Posted in social media ninja | 85 Comments »

Become the news source

Tim looks at why becoming a news blogger is hard work and how simple changes to page layouts and designs can attract and promote your news blogs or any site even if he doesn’t use all the tricks himself.

Most bloggers dream of becoming a major source of news and information, millions of visitors and loads of links when you break yet another story. The pace is fast and furious with near daily race to be the first to get the scoop much like traditional media journalism. A vast quantity of front page traffic on Digg and other social sites is from the same websites time and time again but breaking into the exclusive group of true news bloggers is hard work but I hope some of these handy hints will help.

Why do it?

Before we go further you need to stop and take a step back becoming a news blogger is not suitable for all but a minority, go back to those top sites and you will realise nearly all of them are run by a team. With 24 hours in a day a single person can only do so much, and such sites rarely pay for themselves until they reach a certain critical mass. That said the one page tips I’m presenting will help any blogger interested in attracting the social media visitor.

Getting the page ready

How you present your exclusive story will often make or break your site above all you want people to know what the story is as quickly as possible, using stumblers as our basis you have 5.5 seconds to impress or they are gone.

Images

In many ways are the secret weapon of the news blogger and bloggers in general they add something to the story but they are also a useful social media tool.
Primary Image – this is the main image to accompany the article for maximum effect you want to turn this image into a promotional tool, when people photo blog a review on StumbleUpon the chances of a visitor clicking through from the reviews home page is 25% more likely then a standard review. To maximise people using the image as a photo blog picture make sure the image is under 250k and less then 500px width. Include some sort of identifier and don’t be afraid to include words (just make sure you use your alt tags correctly). When it comes to picture nearly all social media users like BBS big bold and simple a slightly risky strategy is to place the primary image just on the fall of the page to force the user to scroll down to see all the image.
Logo Image - A logo image is an image that appears near the top of the post to help categories and give a post a sense of identity, this further helps to cement in the visitors mind what the article is about as well as providing another promotion point. Google news has for a while now been using an algorithm to select suitable images for use within its site for relevant headlines, this sadly may not interest most wannabe news bloggers who don’t make it onto the Google news pages but the use of such images on Digg certainly will. Since the release of the new picture enabled Digg, users when selecting stories have been offered the option of including a picture from the page if and when a suitable image has been found.
The important thing here is getting the scale right Digg currently is resizing images to 160×120 pixels and is only presenting users with the option of JPG so the ideal logo image should be 160×120 JPG, of course you need to make it interesting enough for the submitter to include it and remember to keep it inoffensive to avoid moderation.

Extract/Summary

Many Stumblers and Diggers simply copy the first few lines of an article when reviewing/submitting so make those lines count. Present an interesting and complete first 2 sentences be it a summary or some sort of opening statement. Just remember to keep it short and sweet otherwise the submitter or the site they are submitting you to will cut it off mid flow.

Typography

I am not a designer but subtle use of modern design concepts such as the use of grids really helps a story along. Don’t let a bad design or typography let your story down because it makes the process to hard to read. One technique borrowed from traditional magazine I find extremely useful is pull out and block quotes. While block quotes have a dedicated tag in html pull quotes do not but there are plenty of Javascript pull quote scripts you can use.

Printing

People still like something tangible so along with good typography a clean way to print the article out is essential at minimum a print.css but also think about promoting printing through a print button.

Social media buttons

Adding pretty icons and badges has been all the rage for a while now even the BBC have got social media badges on some of their pages, but there is no real evidence that this “bookmarking” buttons actually increase the number of people bookmarking sites and can have a very negative effect. On the whole social bookmarking do not cause any ill effects with possibly two exceptions
0 Diggs – Nothing says newbie who can’t fix their template then a Digg button with 0 Diggs, it’s a complete turn off. Social media users tend to flock or hunt in packs a button with a low score can put people off, If you are going to use Digg buttons then only place them on your post at the 20+ mark and make sure you remove them after a few days or immediately after your article is buried no point wasting your users time which could be spent viewing more of your content. You will of course point to the bottom of this page and scream hypocrite what else can I say but bah!
Stumble Me buttons - When StumbleUpon produced a series of buttons people raced of to use them on their blogs without thinking through the consequences. Call it a bug or a protection feature if you like, but Stumble Me buttons are worthless. Every time a user uses your stumble me button to leave a review you lose a potential thumbs up. This is because when you leave a review it does not also thumb up the page as well, so while you might get a couple of hits from peoples home pages on StumbleUpon you will not receive any additional toolbar traffic.

General tips for news blogging

Apart from on page issues some simple things make a large difference in News Blogging

• Work in a team
• Be quick but accurate
• Moderate your comments
• Let others promote you, concentrate on getting the stories
• Don’t be afraid of scrapers always include good full internal links
• Be consistent unlike other forms of blogging news bloggers need to post regularly

Posted in Tips & Tricks, productivity, social media | 7 Comments »

Wow, Social Media is a lot like High School!!

Anyone who knows me knows that I love Social Media. Love, Love, Love, Obsessed, Love Social Media. I’ve been very serious about Social Media and the amount of time I’ve spent doing it daily for the past 6+ months. It didn’t take me long to realize that Social Media has a lot of similarities to High School.

Popular Crowds

Every High School has their popular crowds and Social Media is no exception. Getting into the Popular Crowd can be tough, but we all have heard of the Perks of once we get accepted into it.

Clubs

We all remember Drama Club, Ski Club, Chess Club, Math Club, Wrestling Club, blah, blah, blah. Social Media has Clubs too…. Digg, Reddit, Sphinn, StumbleUpon. Some clubs are more popular than others. We might like all of them, but we don’t have the time to participate in all of them. So, we pick our favorite Clubs and participate in those Clubs the most.

The Bad Boys

Oh boy, did my School have some Bad Boys!! I’m positive all High Schools do. These were the guys who were rebels. They would push the limits. I was always fascinated with the bad boys. Sure, they made me nervous, but there was something about them that made me want to get to know them better. Social Media has the Bad Boys as well. These are bloggers that write whatever is on their mind at the time. They are not out to hurt anybody, but you can feel their emotions in every single one of their controversial posts.

Rule Breakers and Goodie-Goodies

I wish I could say that when I was in High School I was popular, but I can’t…. I was a total Goodie-Goodie. Mostly out of fear of my mother, but whatever. I was a total Nerd!! The Rule Breakers were those kids who, well, broke the rules. They smoked in the bathroom, they were always in detention, and most often they were skipping classes. Well, in Social Media we have the Rule Breakers and Goodie-Goodies too. But, in Social Media we call them Black Hats and White Hats. Social Media wouldn’t be the same without them.

Parties

High School Parties…. the closest I was ever to one was seeing them in movies. I told you…. I was a total Nerd. But, I heard High School Parties rule!! Ok, I went to High School in the 80’s. Do they still say, "Rule"? In Social Media there are Conferences. There is a Major Party going on right now, PubCon, and I’m totally missing it. Can’t blame this one on my mother, but I am totally going to get to one of these Parties, Mom!!

Peer Pressure

I don’t think I have to explain to any of you that there is a ton of Peer Pressure that teens face in High School. We have all been there. I vividly remember the amount of pressure that I was faced while I attended High School and for that reason, among others, I don’t think I would ever want to go back to High School again. Social Media has there own Peer Pressure as well. The pressure surrounding the Social Media community is a bit different, but the pressure feels the same. The Emails, Instant Messages and Shouts to Vote-up, Thumbs-up, and Submit posts are insane.

It can be intense. I’ve reached my 200 friends limit on StumbleUpon and I started to clean house. You couldn’t imagine the emails I received asking why I am no longer a friend with whoever? Are you kidding me? I only got rid of people that hadn’t produced activity in a long time or that I no longer had anything in common with. UGH!! Peer friggin Pressure!!

Gossip

Ahhh, High School Gossip… The who’s dating who, who skipped school to meet their boyfriend, who cheated on who!! Standard Gossip from all High Schools. Well, Social Media has their own gossip….. Facebook, baby!! Gotta love it!! In one day’s time on Facebook I can find out who body slammed who, who got dry humped, where someone is right now and what they are doing, and who drunk dialed who. I can get my fill of gossip and not even feel guilty for it. Well, maybe a little…. after all, I probably could be doing something much more productive. But, it’s called social networking for a reason, right?

Just as with High School we are all trying to find our spot that we fit into with Social Media. It’s a ton of fun, a bit stressful at times, the pressure can be intense, but I wouldn’t change it for the World.

Posted in social media | 16 Comments »

Social Media Marketing is Similar to a Fishing Tournament

Today I would like to address the similarities of how social media marketing is like a fishing tournament with an emphasis on the social voting sites. Many of you already know that I am somewhat of a fishing fanatic. Everything I do has some relation to catching the fish of my dreams!

First let’s look at who the players are and what they compared to, starting with the main prize winner. If you want fame and fortune in the fishing world you want to land the monster Blue Marlin. The winner of a Blue Marlin tournament will often bring TV and newspaper coverage; if you’re lucky enough to catch that tournament winner you will also qualify for many endorsements with offshore fishing equipment companies.

If you’re looking for the same effect online, what site do you want linking to you that compares to winning a Blue Marlin tournament? Digg! Getting an article on the home page of Digg can make your server scream just like the drag screams when line peels off your reel from an acrobatic Blue Marlin racing off toward the horizon. Everyday I see sites go down from the “Digg Effect.”

They’re many fish in the ocean that I can compare to social media related sites; of which we have the major offshore pelagic species. The “pelagic” species live in midwater or close to the surface and commonly the top of their food chain. They include swordfish, tuna, dolphin wahoo, swordfish and many others. These compare to the larger social media sites that are all the rage recently. These social media sites include Digg, Propeller, StumbleUpon and Mixx just to name a few.

Breaking down the list of species and what sites they compare to, starting with Digg. I like to compare Digg to Blue Marlin. Blue Marlin are often very elusive to reach, but worth the effort to seek out. One Digg home page post may bring ten’s of thousands of visitors to your site, but the main prize is the all important backlinks created when other bloggers review your post.

Next up is the newly updated Propeller.com. Until recently you could find them on the Netscape.com domain. They have been renamed their social news voting site to Propeller and are steadily creating a quality traffic stream. Propeller is the Sailfish of the internet. Sailfish are a highly prized fish that produce spectacular runs, just like Propeller can produce spikes in traffic which make them a popular social media site to marketers.

StumbleUpon is the Dolphin that are everywhere offshore. Dolphin, also known as Mahi Mahi, are favored by the weekend warriors because they can catch them with limited fishing experience. Dolphin grow fast but have a limited lifespan so they do not reach the size of Marlin or Sailfish. StumbleUpon creates sustained traffic for up to a week from just one good Stumble. Although this traffic is not as heavy as Digg StumbleUpon traffic is easier to achieve.

New to the scene is Mixx. Mixx is the Snapper of the internet. Mixx is a new social voting site that looks like it will grow into a valuable community with lots of potential. With a little research users can obtain some nice backlinks and targeted traffic. Snapper are one of my favorite species to fish for in a tournament. They can vary in size from small Mangrove Snapper to the very large Cubera snapper that can reach over 100 pounds. If you are looking for a site to market a variety of niches, Mixx is the one to use.

Once you see the similarities of how social media marketing is like a fishing tournament you can start looking at how to approach them to gain the most benefit. For the newbie to social media marketing I recommend you begin with the smaller social media sites. Once you are familiar with how they work you will progress up to StumbleUpon and then finally on to Digg.

Posted in social media | 14 Comments »

What A Mixx Up: Interview With Mixx Founder Chris McGill

With me today is Chris McGill, founder of the latest and greatest social news site, mixx.com. Mixx, only a 7 week old community that’s still in beta, has really taken off as of late, and has been featured in TechCrunch and other prominent blogs.

1 - You’ve got an impressive looking background. Can you tell us a little about your experience with Yahoo and USA Today, and perhaps how these experiences prepared you for the foray into making a social news site?

My experiences at Yahoo and at USA Today were pretty different. Yahoo, back in the day under Mallet and TK and the crew, was pretty much the Wild West. We were told to do what we thought was right. And there were literally dogs and an assortment of other critters running in the hallways. I’m proud of what we did with Yahoo News. We took a different approach—rather than producing news we simply empowered the user to customize what they wanted to look at, ignore what they didn’t, take action, share, see what was the most popular and go to the source if we didn’t have the content on Yahoo itself. Mixx is just a natural extension of that.

Working in a traditional press corporation like USA Today is very different. There is a certain way of doing things and while there are many people vigorously trying to adapt, long-standing culture and infrastructure (like big expensive iron presses) make it difficult to change rapidly. My time at USA Today gave me a huge appreciation for what the traditional press does for all of us. I’ve met reporters who literally walk into battle zones and risk their lives (usually getting paid very little to do so) to bring back information vital for all of us to make political, financial and moral decisions.

Taken together, my experiences with Yahoo News and USA Today gave me some understanding of what people want out of information and how they use it.

At Mixx, our mission is to bring together users and publishers (whether that’s a Mommy Blogger or big media) who are interested in the same topics. If we succeed, then everyone wins.

2 - What made you decide to start a social news site in the first place? Mixx doesn’t really seem like a niche site, so it appears to be direct competition with the major players (Digg, Reddit, Propeller, StumbleUpon, Newsvine, Del.icio.us)? I suppose though that Mixx’s personalization aspect makes it a different experience – is this the plan?

First, I like all those other sites and they certainly served as inspiration. But I wanted to take what these other sites do well and then be able to focus it on the things that I’m interested in. For example, sure, I want to know what people in general are interested in (text, photos, videos), but I also want to know what people in Bethesda, MD, are telling me I should look at, what Red Sox fans are raving or complaining about, and what people who are tracking research on Alzheimer’s (a family legacy I would prefer to avoid) are telling me is important. I wasn’t able to do that with any of the existing sites.

On Mixx, I’ve set up a private group for my co-workers, as well as one for the parents of my daughter’s pre-school classmates. I’m guessing that those groups wouldn’t be of much interest to many other people. Look, the reality is that we all have different interests; a one-size-fits-all recommendation board isn’t going to be very helpful to a diverse group of people. So a mom in Des Moines who comes to Mixx to find information relevant to her life and interests is just as welcome as our community of hard-core techies who use tags to drill down into tech topics. And it’s important to note that anyone who comes to Mixx can create topics of interest if they do not already exist, by using tags.

There are four ideas that drive us:
1) Personalization: We take as our example the likes of MyYahoo, Pageflakes and Netvibes.
2) Democratization: Obviously Digg and Reddit blazed the trail here.
3) Personal contact only when the user wants it: LinkedIn and Facebook were our standards.
4) Marvin Gaye: Because in Marvin’s words, “We’re all sensitive people with so much to give.”

3 – If I may, would love to share some ideas for improvement with you.

a. Many successful social sites have useful browser plugins to increase your ability to interact with the community, even when you aren’t directly on the site. Any plans for a toolbar release?

We absolutely have plans to do a toolbar. Giving our members a constant touch-point to Mixx is a great community builder—not to mention just good business.

b. Any plans for an open API? I’m sure that more developers could take the community to the next level.

Ah, someone’s been sneaking a look at our roadmap! APIs are one of the projects we’re working on right now. Our initial plan is to use them to build a Facebook application, but by opening up, we’re certainly hopeful that the community will step in and create cool applications that we never envisioned.

c. If I friend a user, they get an email that says that
<user> thinks you are a really cool person who knows your way around the web.

If they friend me back, I get a message saying:
<user> thinks you are a really cool person who knows your way around the web.

With the current growth rate of Mixx, I would find it easier to keep track if a friend back message said
<user> has returned the favor and friended you back.

This is a great suggestion, and probably something we should have been doing from the start. We’ve been working on our email communications, so we can definitely add in this idea.

d. How about giving users the ability to private message each other?

This is also on our roadmap. Allowing direct communications between users is a wonderful community-builder and something we want to move on as soon as we can. Unfortunately (or maybe it’s a good thing), we have a very long roadmap, and we’ve had such great feedback from the community that we want to give priority to some of their most-requested items.

e. How about making a Mixx button similar to Digg, Reddit and Sphinn that shows the number of votes an item has received?

A gallery of Mixx buttons is on the way. We hope to have some available on the site within a couple of weeks. But our first priority is to complete the APIs that we talked about earlier.

4 – What’s your whole take on Greg (aka cGt2099) getting banned from Digg episode? Looks like quite a number of Diggers have come over to Mixx since this episode.

Let me start off by saying that we have a lot of respect for what Digg has created. They’ve provided their users with an amazing set of tools to recommend content to each other. They also have a very strong community, and they have obviously been very successful and a key part of the Web 2.0 movement.

As far as Greg getting banned…I have no idea what happened. All I know is that Greg is a fabulous and active member of the Mixx community and we are very happy to have him.

5 – There are some good looking signs that Mixx is on the move. Some users have created the mixxingbowl, a forum site for Mixx, and stats show Mixx increasing fast. How many users are in the system now, and do you think that this rate of growth can compete with other social news sites?

The things we are seeing in the community just blow us away. Seriously, it is just incredibly heartening. People we had never talked to went out and set up a site called mixxingbowl.com to discuss what they like and what they don’t like about Mixx, as well as ways they can help us. I have been in the digital information business for nearly a decade—never seen anything like it. I think it does two things: 1) It shows that what we’re trying to do has struck a cord out there and people really appreciate it and, 2) it makes us want to run to work every morning to try to execute for these people. It is crazy fun, really. Emphasis on both the crazy and the fun.

As for our growth, we are seeing some encouraging trends. Visits and page views continue to rise on a day-over-day basis. Time spent on the site is increasing. We’re seeing a lot more voting and commenting. The photos section is really taking off. I could go on (and on and on!), but we know that we have a long way to go, and want to keep working with our users to build a friendly, vibrant community where people come to find content in their areas of interest.

6 – Do you see Mixx as an acquisition target? Something like Reddit or Newsvine?

I know some people will find it hard to believe, but we don’t even think about that right now. Maybe someday, but right now what we think about it how to make the product better and what the community is telling us they want.

7 – Are you pleased with the usage and turnout on Mixx so far? What are your goals?

We’re thrilled with the turnout—who wouldn’t be? We’re still really little because we’ve only been out for seven weeks, but as we continue to grow, we’re going to keep working to maintain the small community feel—we think the way we’re structured will allow us to do that. Our goal is to have a happy, engaged community that people will want to make a part of their daily routine.

8 - Why did you decide not to have any category of online marketing stuff, they have Apple but no Microsoft = back to the old Digg setup.

For a while we had Science and Tech in the same bucket and were limited by space as to how many sub-categories, or topics, we offered there. When we split those categories in two, we were able to create specific topics that people had been asking for—like Linux and Design. One of our next upgrades will include a few more topics that folks have been requesting—Microsoft and Software are two that come to mind.

The thing to remember is that categories are just plain old stock… users can set up tags to create ANY category they want.

9 – Does Mixx discourage or encourage submitting your own content? Communities such as Digg are not very big on having users submit their own content. Whereas many niche communities such as Sphinn actively encourage self-submissions of quality content by an author.

The only content we don’t encourage is submitting content that violates our Terms of Use. Our community will determine whether the content is worth recommending to others by voting up.

10 - Will there be a way to distinguish between friends, followers and mutual friends? I look at my page of followers and don’t know who I have friended back.

Great suggestions keep coming. We absolutely should do this, and will be part of what we’re doing as a general theme to encourage more community features to the site.

Thanks so much for your time, Chris! You’re really well on your way to building a great community. I’m glad you and your team are receptive to the feedback within your users.

Thanks for having me Brian!

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