Bloggers have relied on aggregators like Digg and Mixx to drive traffic to their sites but Yahoo! has a similar product in beta that could catapult the social media into the main stream. It’s called Yahoo! Buzz.

For a quick review: these aggregators allow users to post links to articles from around the web. If the articles get positive votes, they are elevated in ranks and can appear on the home page. This makes it easy for viewers to find them and helps viewers identify with articles are worth reading.

Sites like Digg and Mixx have been working hard to get a mainstream audience but have only made small inroads. What Yahoo! brings to the table is the audience. They already have an audience. By building these tools they will propel small blogs, forum posts, and unheard of websites to the forefront. This will make it possible for articles all over the web to get much more attention.

ReadWriteWeb gives us a few stats from the Yahoo! Buzz beta:

· When Yahoo.com linked to one of their stories, The Smoking Gun received approximately 1 million additional page views over their average traffic, with over 275,000 visitors coming from the Yahoo! homepage.

· Portfolio.com (part of Conde Net) received over half a million referral visits from a Yahoo.com “Buzzing Now” link.

· HuffingtonPost received over 800,000 unique visitors from Yahoo.com in one day.

· Dallas Morning News’ traffic spiked as a result of their Yahoo.com “Buzzing Now” link, making the featured story their most viewed single story on dallasnews.com that day.

If your company doesn’t have a plan to manage this type of publicity from customers or a plan to make use of this type of publicity to market, you better get started. Things to consider include:

• What are you doing that would encourage others to write about you or to post that information in these aggregators?
• Can your website & host handle a major increase in traffic? Think cloud computing for an affordable solution.
• How will you know about your web feedback and how will you handle it?