If there is one thing I have learned in social media it is that when something becomes hot everyone and their second cousin wants to jump on the bandwagon. Very few people truly create content and an even smaller few of those create good or quality content. None of them create quality content all of the time.
Let's take as an example the recent announcement from Nintendo that they will be offering free Wii-Remote jackets to consumers who have purchased a Wii and that they will be including them in all future shipments of Wiis and Wii-Remotes. This is news and Nintendo clearly wants this news to propagate around the Internet for maximum exposure. Nintendo does this by releasing the press release to those that they deem worthy of carrying Nintendo news. They also post this on their own sites.
The first tier of video game sites gets this information, and unless it comes out when the staff has gone home, looks it over and decides if it is worthy of publication and comment. Some items just get run as a press release (do you really need to add much commentary to the weekly virtual console release information) while others get special treatment.
These top tier sites typicaly get millions of hits everyday and are widely read. People subscribe to their RSS feeds or even have the site content emailed to them. After the top tier sites print the news it often gets submitted to social media sites such as Digg or Propeller. Once the news hits these sites it is judged worthy or not worthy and the masses begin to comment on the news.
Shortly after the content begins to gain popularity a myriad of low level bloggers grab the content and publish it on their own site. Some add a little editorial joke or two while others just copy and provide a link back to where they found it.
At this point everything is good and the system is working the way it should. Things never do work as they should though for long. Before long some people get the idea to submit their version of the story to a social media site because they think their coverage is somehow better. 99% of the time it is not.
Within 10 hours of the original submission to Digg for this news (via Kotaku) there were already 11 duplicates on site.
Listen up people. It's one thing to talk about what everyone else is talking about on your site but don't go submitting it to social media sites after the giant has already hit the front page! All it does it get your content buried as a duplicate (yes, I buried all the dupes) and your site marked as blog-spam by the majority of diggers.
Yes, I wrote about this item as well but I got my information straight from Nintendo. If someone wants to submit content from HMTK to a social media site PLEASE insure it is not a dupe first!
