Marktd and New PR Offer Digg for Marketing and PR People

Digg.com is a great resource for client research.  For all of our tech clients, it's a useful site to keep track of the most popular news stories in the tech industry.  The site's model of allowing users to vote for their favourite articles or blog posts and allowing the votes to dictate which appear more highly is changing the editorial structure for news in the same way that eBay's online auction model revolutionized how people sell their old stuff to others.  Yet as wonderful a resource that Digg is, it was only a matter of time before other sites would start to pop up using the same model and extending it beyond the tech industry.  Now in the last few weeks, I have found two in the marketing and PR space: Marktd and New PR.  Piers Fawkes, founder of PSFK is behind Marktd - and often posts links to the site.  On New PR, the most prolific poster at the moment is Constantin Basturea - one of the top PR bloggers I have been reading for more than a year now.  Both are highly credible individuals whom I recognize and their involvement makes me far more likely to pay attention to the sites.  Most interesting about both sites, though, is how I discovered them in the first place. 

Like most bloggers, I pay attention to who links to my site - and it was through links to a blog post that I made my way to both of these sites.  I suspect many early visitors to the site had the same experience.  There is a smart strategy here that anyone wanting to generate awareness of a product or service with bloggers should pay attention to.  Rather than just sending emails to a blogger, or posting comments to their blog - another method of promotion involves linking to a blogger's posts and generating awareness of your site through the assumption that a blogger will follow the referring link to your site.  This is a strategy that we have been using successfully for a client for the past few months, as well as the original concept behind the Ogilvy Blogfeeds that we launched several months ago (though they are now in dire need of an update).  While I will probably end up contributing more to Marktd since I always describe myself as a "marketing guy in a PR agency" ... New PR is definitely one to watch if the success of the PR Wiki and The Global PR Week are any indication.  It won't be long before there is another site like this focused on advertising.