Power of Digg.com Highlighted at Ad:tech Event

News website Digg.com has become the most influential website of its type, a panel of social media PR experts has declared.

The site enables users to send in and rate news articles, websites, blogs and other posts. They are promoted to its ‘front page' via a user-based ranking system.

The panel, at the ad:tech conference at London's Olympia last week, comprised: Anthony Mayfield, head of content and media at Spannerworks; Katy Howell, MD of online PR firm Immediate Future; Flemming Madsen, MD of web analysis firm Onalytica; and Mark Rogers, CEO of blog and web monitoring service Market Sentinel.

‘Once a story hits Digg it goes wild - the number of mentions and links it gets from other websites, bloggers and journalists rockets,' said Rogers.

Digg.com was set up two years ago in the US, earning 29-year-old founders Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson around £32m in the past 18 months alone.

NOTE... When using Google to search for information on a company, two-thirds of UK adults believe that the first ten results denote the top brands or industry leaders, a YouGov poll commissioned by Spannerworks has found.

In fact, a Google ranking is decided by many factors.

Speaking at ad:tech, Spannerworks' Mayfield said 88 per cent of the world's top 100 brands have ‘Wikipedia' listed in their top 20 Google search results. ‘This shows just how vital it is for PROs to understand how search-engines and social media work,' he added.