I still don’t get StumbleUpon
Andy Beard’s 7 StumbleUpon Problems I Would Love to See Fixed reminded me that I’m still not getting hip to the StumbleUpon phenomenon. I responded with the following:
I simply find StumbleUpon frustrating to use and comprehend in general. I’d love to make use of it as a way to submit content to a social media site, help it to find an audience, and participate to some extent in that community (I’m not necessarily interested in stumbling upon new websites myself) but I’m not ashamed to say that I have trouble getting on board with how the thing works.
Anyone else in this boat? I hear that people love it, that publishers love it, etc. but I’ve given it several chances and ending up simply walking away in frustration.
For example, can you submit multiple articles from a single site, or do you submit one URL and then let the mystical forces of StumbleUpon take over? What do you once you’ve submitted a site or an article?
Maybe I’m missing the magic Easy button that everyone else has managed to find 
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February 9th, 2008 at 2:52 am
Well, for one thing, you need the StumbleUpon Firefox extension to do anything. After that, it’s as easy as pressing “I like it!” to submit something since you can’t submit something new by hitting the thumbs down button.
I don’t use it as much as I used to, but I like it.
February 9th, 2008 at 5:01 am
Stumbleupon is a bit like window shopping, the readers are not in buying mode, just browsing.
In some ways it is also like feed reading lots of shared feeds. You choose to follow up to 199 other people, and set your surfing channel to “stumble favorites of friends”
Each time you hit the stumble button, you are served a page that one of your friends liked.
Or you can choose to stumble pages from the topics you selected, as an example if I am looking for design inspiration, I can stumble web design stuff (there are always lots of good examples)
Stumbleupon isn’t really something you submit your content to, though you can get away with it occasionally especially if you have a lot of anonymous niche sites with timeless content.
February 9th, 2008 at 5:28 am
then don’t use stumble we’ll get along without you
i promise.
go type load “stumble”,8,1
then run.
you’ll be fine.
February 9th, 2008 at 5:48 am
stumble upon is nice for branding purpose. You should ensure that once you get stumble effect, visitors will be impressed to your page.
you will get stumble effect if someone (mostly top stumbler) give your page thumb up. I got this effect 3 times for my new blog. about 1000 unique visits each in two days. I found the guy who give my page a thumb up.
February 9th, 2008 at 7:40 am
Stumbleupon is great for driving large amounts of unfocused traffic to you blog .. This is because friends see the links of friends … So the more people you’re connected to on stumble, the more people are able to see a certain URL and the more people are likely to click it and visit your blog …
However like Andy said, these people are not in buying mode … Making it true that your blog has to be ready for these types of visitors if you are going to have any benefit from them …
Branding is one of the things that can be done by making a good first impression …
Grs,
Lex
February 9th, 2008 at 12:18 pm
ejes, that’s the winning approach that makes you so popular! Dropping a bit of C-64 trivia into a mocking comment is what really separates the geeks from the nerds, for sure.
EB, I think the Firefox extension is the key to everything. That, and StumbleUpon is much, much harder to game than most UGC indexers, which makes it awesome. Then again, it’s a bit confusing to start up, as you’ve discovered, which makes it less than awesome.
I would suggest installing the Firefox extension and then clicking the stumble button in the toolbar a few times to see what kind of things you see. When you’ve got an article you think people will really like, thumbs-up your own article. Also, thumbs-up other article you see around the net that are similarly cool.
It’s definitely no Digg/Reddit, but it’s not so geekily biased, either, which is cool. Despite my geekiness, sometimes I just wanna see what’s going on in the world.
February 9th, 2008 at 1:42 pm
First of all, thanks for the great responses, ideas, and suggestions y’all !
Second, I probably should have been a little bit clearer in the original post. I get what StumbleUpon is. I understand that you download a browser extension, that you can click around and find new sites, submit the ones you like to the SU community, that in theory the more you participate the more relevant the sites that are retuned, and so on. It’s not my particular bag, but lots of people seem to like it, and that’s great.
So I get StumbleUpon and certainly don’t have anything against it. What I don’t get about it is this: how publishers harness StumbleUpon to get more traffic and more site visits.
That’s why I wrote this piece: I’d love to hear how publishers utilize StumbleUpon to their advantage. Do publishers submit specific articles to StumbleUpon? Do they actively participate at StumbleUpon to become a presence there — via accumulating friends, commenting around, and so forth — with the idea that people will check out their site in return? Or do they simply submit their site once and then sit back and wait for the SU riches to return?
By the way — some kind soul out there submitted this very story to StumbleUpon and its received a few hundred visits over night, so that answers another key question: the ability to submit specific stories versus the site as a whole.
Now, finally, I must admit that I’ve never gotten as deep into what StumbleUpon’s all about as I would have liked because I’ve had some technical / administrative issues with it. I checked it out last year, and then for a variety of reasons tried to sign up for a new account on a differnet computer. This proved to be nearly impossible, which was as you can imagine a little bit frustrating.
February 9th, 2008 at 1:44 pm
Sterfish, great to see you back around these parts! And I think the like it/don’t like it thing is cool, kind of a digg/reddit/social news way of browsing around sites that are part of the StumbleUpon archives.
February 9th, 2008 at 1:47 pm
Andy, great info as always! I wasn’t aware that you can choose to get a selection of “stumbles” based upon what your SU friends like. Because I’m more familiar with Digg, this reminds me of some of their deeper features.
It also reminds me of Reddit’s new feature that lets people create their own “sub reddit” niche social news communities. As a partial aside: would be interesting to see deeper social networking tools around such niche communities. And of course this is what StumbleUpon is doing in its own way.
February 9th, 2008 at 1:48 pm
ejes - I’ve no doubt that StumbleUpon will manage to get along without me!
I wrote this piece in the hope of learning more about it, and I certainly am at that.
February 9th, 2008 at 1:50 pm
ganes, you wrote: “You should ensure that once you get stumble effect, visitors will be impressed to your page.”
How do you do this, and what are your suggestions?
February 9th, 2008 at 1:52 pm
Lex - You’re helping to answer one of my questions, sounds like getting heavily involved in the StumbleUpon community can be a means for a publisher to drive traffic back to one’s site.
February 9th, 2008 at 1:54 pm
Phillip, my old friend, what up?
I’ve kind of been locked into a quick rotation of Google News, Drudge, Techmeme/Memeorandum, Digg/Reddit, Bloglines to see what’s going on in the world, but you make a compelling argument to get StumbleUpon into the mix, at least every once in a while.
February 10th, 2008 at 2:06 pm
[…] I still don’t get StumbleUpon […]
February 11th, 2008 at 1:44 pm
maybe you should checkout my series on stumbleupon on my blog. It goes into detail on how SU works
February 13th, 2008 at 10:13 pm
First of all, I came across this post on SU.
If you really want to learn how to use StumbleUpon efficiently, read the the blog above written by robdogg. I joined StumbleUpon in 2006 and never downloaded the toolbar. After losing my page rank due to Google’s ewar, I decided to do things differently. My income was greatly effected. I visited SU, was a little confused, befriended robdogg, read his tutorials and …success!
I have to say, I’m addicted to SU. I use all the popular social networking sites, but SU is my favorite. Your servers may not crash like with Digg’s front page traffic, but you can get a considerable amount. Most importantly, you can interact with people that would normally not be in your “circle of friends”.
Just wanted to share my experience. Hope to see you at SU!
February 14th, 2008 at 11:00 pm
Thanks guys - sounds like robdogg was who I was looking for when writing about stumbleupon!