I've been thinking about an initiative to build a network of people with twitter and digg accounts who will agree to blast out messages for one another. This project will give me an opportunity to make it happen in some form.

In an ideal state, there would be many people who all want the benefit of having a network to market their product, boost their site traffic, or whatever. These people would come to the interface page, and add their twitter and digg user names and an e-mail account to the list.

Once a list is built, let's say I write a blog entry that I want to get out there to the masses. I then send out to the group that I need people to tweet my column and I need them to "digg" it. I then get a big blast of diggs and tweets, and therefore traffic.

Obviously, this can be done through good ol' fashion online networking, but my hope here is to build a network with a formalized agreement to promote one another.

The key will be to make it an easy process to sign up for this and a policing system to ensure people are pulling their weight. It would also require a vehicle for users to communicate their desires to other users.

I would envision this being an online interface where users can input what they need from the group, and the request is sent to the other users. It would then be up to the other users to send out the information and select that they “Digg” the story.

Example of desired result:

We have 100 members. I finish a blog post and I want people to read it. I go to the interface I will make for this project (I probably won't try to implement it) and write the text for a tweet and give the url for the Digg submission. Though I can only expect a percentage of members to follow through on any given request, let's say that number is 60 percent for any given correspondence. After using my interface, I suddenly reach thousands of people through Twitter and have an article on Digg with 6o Diggs – not too shabby.

I'm basically targeting tech savvy self-promoters on the Web. The idea is to group these people and have them focus their energy toward the group when called upon. The power of 100 promoters working on one article, even momentarily is much more than one person can do. All of this will be explained on the site. Basically, if 100 people put in two minutes of work to help out others, they receive 100s of minutes of promotion from the others when they need it.

This idea sprang from an experiment I was trying to do with Digg. The SEO grader lists digg as one of the grading points. I wanted to see of Diggs would improve SERP, so I tried getting out on twitter that this was an experiment and explained what I was trying to do and asked anyone to take a few seconds to Digg it so I could see if it changed the SERP. So many people liked my idea, added me on twitter etc, but no one actually did what I asked. So this gave me the idea to try to harness the power of these people and be able to focus it on specific online ventures. 

James Lambert is a Vermont newspaper editor, more specifically the design editor at the Rutland Herald. He is also an MSIT student at Marlboro College and enjoys developing Web sites and SEO. He blogs here from time to time about these topics.