In order to be successful (and maintain your sanity) you need to have a social media home base from which to operate. Now what do I mean by a home base? I mean choosing one social media service/outlet and mastering it to the point of ad-nauseum. Own that site, make it your bitch. Work hard to learn every secret, trick and personality of the site's users and act accordingly. The site I chose to make my initial first stand?Digg.
Digg users are often not given enough credit by PR people like myself. They can be fickle, extremely critical and downright mean. However, they do offer the best traffic, if a post makes it to the front page. The "Digg Effect" can result in upwards of 20k page views...a great opportunity for marketing any kind of internet product. The Digg "code" (if there even is one) can be extremely tough to crack. Often profiles have been created with the intent of providing great content but have been abandoned after only two weeks of use and 3 diggs to their name.
(That annoys me to no end by the way...and that goes for most Diggers)
I chose Digg because I knew it would be the toughest place to market my products and also the place where I would learn the most. Digg Power Users are truly the elite animals of the social media world (and a lot of them are marketers). I learned a great deal in just the first two months of using Digg (not even as a marketing tool), by simply starting conversations and trying to absorb every article, blog and social nuance possible.
Eventually once I had built up a network of like minded individuals, I discovered that they were also involved in other aspects of social media (go figure, hehe) and decided to branch out into those areas. Reddit, StumbleUpon , Blogging, and eventually Twitter to name a few. I started out on Digg and ended up on Twitter. Admittedly, not 
exactly the most orthodox path to social media success. However, by having a trial by fire at Digg...I was able to easily absorb and conquer the lessons and intricacies of most of the other social aggregators.
By starting off in one place and building up a network/following there, I was able to create a "home base" for myself. I will always come back to Digg, it was my first love and my most important lesson. To be successful you need to be able to master one area...then branch out and GO SLOWLY.
¹Picture: Joyoftech.com
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tagged as Digg, home base, joyoftech, kevin rose, Marketing, PR, Reddit, Social Media
I never thought of this topic before, but I guess I'd have to say my home base is Stumble. That being said, I'd love to learn how to get the most out of Digg. I have been a member for about 6 months, and I have added a lot of articles I found helpful, interesting or thought provoking, but I haven't found it to be that much of a success for me. However, after reading this post I am rethinking the whole Digg situation.
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