It’s no secret that Digg, Reddit and other news and media aggregators are a target for search marketers. In my quest to learn more about the intricacies of these social environments, I sought after a community to review and understand a bit more.

The trouble I ran into was that with sites like Digg was that there are too many active users and too much going on at any one moment to form hypotheses on.

While analyzing the marketing opportunities of a socially active environment may seem difficult, the one I ended up reviewing was quite simple. Since the title of my post eliminates any element of suspense, I’ll plainly say Sphinn was the community I opted to dissect.

What I found was some great potential, but a number of obvious problems that are preventing the community from growing.

** Please note, this post was a draft for about 3 weeks, so now that it’s live, the data is a few weeks old. **

Background / History
First, let’s understand the purpose of Sphinn. Created by Search Engine Land and Danny Sullivan, Sphinn was officially launched on July 12, 2007 for the purpose of aggregating newsworthy items in the search industry. The links featured on Sphinn could come from blog posts, news portals, forums, etc. At the end of the day though, content was said to be specific to the search industry.

Basic Data on Community Users
For me, a community is only as rich as the number of active participants. When I pulled my data there were 12,410 registered members according to the alphabetical listing of users shown in the Sphinn Network.

Now, I watch Sphinn on a regular basis. I’m positive that 12,410 is not a fair representation of the active user base. In fact, I’d say that number of really active members is more along the line of 124, or just 1 percent.

Continuing to pull numbers using the available search features, I came up with a few key stats:

Registered Users: 12,410
Users with 5+ Submissions: 750
Users with 2+ Comments: ~1,300
Users with 1+ Sphinn: 6,259

My Initial Reaction…
Are you flipping kidding me?

Communities, like all social groups tend to have two types of users - leaders and followers. With Sphinn, I’d consider the leaders as those making the most submissions and comments while the followers are the pile jumpers who just vote for things to see their own stature improved upon.

Now - as Gerhart would surely tell me, this is a community where stardusters look to promote their own work. When they post, they hit up friends and colleagues to Sphinn up their stories to help cement their legitimacy in a rather veiled, niche industry. (Of course, I’m okay with that, especially because people often ask for Sphinns and I tend to reciprocate that behavior because it’s free traffic.)

The Leaders (Submitters and Commenters)
750 members, or 6.04% of the community has more than five submissions. Five. While I love to set really low expectations so they can easily be met, even this surprised me.

Unless I’m entirely off base here, and I know I could be - I believe that five submissions would classify a casual user of the network, not a leader. Here’s a graphic I made because Excel likes to do that for me:

Looking into it further, I thought okay… My standards are too high. maybe the leaders don’t really submit things, but contribute on a regular basis in their commentary of submitted stories.

It took lowering my expectations to get the numbers to improve. There were about 1,300 users who have submitted multiple comments on Sphinn. That’s less than 10.5%. For those who like graphs with complimentary colors, I give you this:

Hyperactive Users
Or maybe I mean hyperactive ABUSERS? You be the judge.

First, my apologies to Bill Hartzer and Steven Bradley. I’m using your activity on Sphinn to prove a couple of points here, and in exchange for that I’m giving you each a backlink without no-follows for good measure. I have never (knowingly) met either Bill or Steven, so I apologize if this offends anyone. I’m not trying to judge any characters here, just user data as provided to me on Sphinn.

Bill Hartzer, The Sphinnmaster
Bill Hartzer (bhartzer) has cast 10,427 Sphinns. The next active user, Maki (DoshDosh) has 5,108 Sphinns. That’s 48.9% of the actvity of Bill. In other words, Bill’s out there giving our Sphinns like candy on Halloween. Stopping short of accusing Bill of just sphinning everything he sees, I’ll say this… Bill has 1 comment for every 100 sphinns cast. Continuing the comparison, DoshDosh has nearly 5 comments per 100 sphinns cast. aimclear, Sphinn’s third most active user produces nearly 12 commens per 100 sphinns.

I’m sorry Bill, I just don’t see how you can vote for that many items without providing more commentary. I’m certainly open to your response though. Am I just assuming too much on the numbers?

Steven Bradley, Speed Sphinn’er
Steven goes by the name of VanGogh on Sphinn. He sphinns a lot of Search Engine Journal’s posts. That pleases me. While wrapping up this post though I clicked on over to Sphinn Live. Here’s what I saw (my notes in red):

In a 16 second span, Steven read and voted up three stories. Then, Bradley picks up by giving out another 2 votes in a 44 second time span.

If Stephen’s sphinns are truly a vote of authority or approval, then Steven read 5 articles in 66 seconds, and judged their contents highly enough to vote for them on Sphinn.

(added hours after initial post)
The Community Responds!
Please Note — Since the time this was posted, I’ve gotten some great feedback and responses on my thoughts. Particularly, I want to applaud Bill Hartzer’s blog post and Steven Bradley’s comment. Both of these gentlemen took the position of absolute professionalism - and their thoughts and counterpoints need to be read.

Furthermore, Danny Sullivan offered his thoughts on my post as well on the Sphinn story page for this post. Please be sure to read the comments there in conjunction with this blog post.
(end of post-launch additions)

Don’t Bite the Hand That Feeds!
I’m not bashing Sphinn directly here, so please understand that. The only thing I’d like to do here is raise some concern for what has quickly become a reputable site and resource for those in the industry.

Sphinn provides a decent amount of traffic to Search Engine Journal and it has done the same for my blog here too. However, I’m afraid that some activities need to be policed a bit more.

Should a user be able to vote up 5 stories per minute?

Should users be permitted to continuously vote for things without contributing more comments, submissions or feedback to the community?

Should user accounts be archived or removed after a specific duration of inactivity?

Is there Enough Data?
Rather than come off as accusatory or assumptive, I do understand that there could be too small of a data sample to work from here. What do you think? Is there enough data here to warrant making changes to help the long term growth of the Sphinn community? Can the community continue to grow beyond the limited reach it has already required?

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These are only a few questions that come to mind for me, and I’d love for these thoughts to be heard by the Sphinn Staff. That’s all I’ve got for tonight, but I’m all ears when it comes to readers comments. Of course, I’ll be submitting this to Sphinn for good measure… Gotta cash in on that free traffic!

I don’t want to always blog about SEO.  That’s what Search Engine Journal is for.  I know that my one main failure with my blog is that I simply do not post enough.  So, here’s another non-SEM related post.

This weekend simply kicked ass, and it did for a number of reasons.

First, my good friend Dan got married to his gal for the past 9 or 10 years, Alicia.  Since their in their mid 20’s, that’s saying something.  (You may recall the torn bicep?  Yeah, that was all due to Dan’s bachelor party. ) So, in the early afternoon we attended the church service - and then in the evening, we went to the country club for the reception.

Dan and Alicia  had their reception at Alpine Country Club, the same place that Bethany and I got married at in 2005.  They’re also honeymooning at  Iberostar Bavaro Princess in Punta Cana (Dominican Republic) — the exact same resort we honeymooned at.  I guess we’re a model couple? :)

The Celtics scared the bejeesus out of my on Friday night with their lackluster performance in Atlanta.  Thankfully, they proved my forecast correct when they embarrassed the Hawks — who — may not have realized that the game was this afternoon and not this evening.  Those poor guys simply didn’t show up.

I woke up this morning thinking that I would not get out to do any fishing.  When I saw the pouring rains and the river rising, I assumed the worst.  (Finding this chart didn’t help things either.)

I ended up napping till the start of the Celtics game, watching the first half at home and then went to the in-laws to watch the game with my father in law.  When that ended, we packed up the truck and the dog, and did some fishing.  We didn’t catch anything of course… But we still got out.

And tonight, it’s been pretty chill and relaxed.  I’m really just looking forward to the week that starts in about 9 hours. :)

I’ve been a Celtics fan for years. I’m not one of those bandwagon jumpers, as I’ve been dedicated to the team for years and have managed www.delonte.com for the better part of three years. Delonte West had been my favorite Celtic since being drafted, as I was a fan of his amazing run at Saint Joe’s before going pro.

While my once favorite Celtic was traded away (to Seattle) and then again (to Cleveland), I’ve remained true to the green blood running through my veins.

So here’s the thing: My love for the Celtics is being tested. Thankfully, the Celtics are going to win game 7 with ease, but as much as I like watching this team play - I could do without all this silly drama. Further, it’s as if everyone wrote off the Hawks including the Celtics players themselves.

The intensity on Sunday will be unlike anything we’ve ever seen, heard or experienced in the Garden. I mean, since the new building went up, it’s been years of disappointments provided to fans by both the Bruins and the Celtics.

Anyway - as a reminder for just how intense this game 7 will be, I want to share my absolute favorite video of all time via YouTube. It’s the broadcast version of what is played before the players are introduced.

Sorry Hawks fans, I may have lost my fingernails, but you’re about to start your summer early.

A bit over a week ago, I decided that my Twitter account had become too distracting.  With an abundance of work to take care of, I opted to remove the account and thus eliminate any possible distractions.

That worked well.  Until things began to settle down anyways.  That’s when I realized that I missed the opportunity catch the small details that don’t quite make it to my RSS reader.  Like, the introduction of Matt McGee from Small Business SEM and Jeff Quipp from Search Engine People.

They’re blogging about their competition and the charitable events here:

Game on Matt … 1st to 500 Twitter Followers Wins!
Twittering for Charity: Follow Me

I love both Matt and Jeff, and was more thrilled that they took their Twitter holdout status and managed to break down for the sake of charity.  I mean really… I just use it as a marketing tool — and these cats are out there using it to raise money.

Go figure.

Anyways, this morning Loren hit me up with a post from SEJ that invited the SEJ readers to interact with Search Engine Journal members on Twitter.  I’ve been getting a steady stream of new follower requests, so I’m happy to be back and part of the community again.

Follow me at: http://twitter.com/EricLander

So, my account is completely restored.  I just lost about 1,000 updates in the process.  I guess we’ll see it as a little spring cleaning!