Even more on StumbleUpon
I received several outstanding comments on my last piece (I still don’t get StumbleUpon) from the likes of Andy Beard, Sterfish, ganes, Lex G, and my old friend Phillip Winn from Blogcritics. It prompted me to respond with a lengthy comment that I feel deserves to be reposted here, slightly tweaked to make sense as a standalone-ish post:
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 the original 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 the original story to StumbleUpon and it 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 different computer. This proved to be nearly impossible, which was as you can imagine a little bit frustrating.
