There is always one question on my mind when I am working on Social Media; How am I going to track my efforts? And what is a waste of time? It is very difficult to perfectly determine what type of Social Media pieces have potential to go viral without practice and patience. Thankfully, there are people out there who put a lot of time into this research.

Yesterday on ReadWriteWeb, Dan Zarrella wrote an article about the new tool he developed which helps Diggers test out keywords, before they submit a story.  The tool researches the keywords from within the title and description of the top 33,000 front page stories that made it to the Digg holy homepage in 2007. This is quite an impressive database!

Obviously we are all aware of the benefits of Digg, but there are also hidden dangers.  If you are in the Brand Management field you might be afraid that people who find your story on Digg want to blog negatively about it, or leave tons of negative comments, etc.   Of course this is a possibility on any social platform and needs to be monitored.

By using the tool that Zarrella has created, we might have found a safe tool the check the history of similar content.  In the end this might save us a lot of time doing research, and having failed attempts.

Many clients and even some of our peers don’t really understand the space that is Digg.  This tool might help to explain some efforts that are used. And naturally… new tools are a lot of fun!