Chris Abraham » Social Bookmark

38 Articles About Social Media Strategy and Techniques

Chris Abraham — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 05:41:48 +0000

I have collected a number of thoughts I have had on social media, blogging, social networking, blogger outreach & engagement, blogger activation, astroturfing, and other fun stuff I call Insights — 38 in all — that I just stumbled upon and I thought it would be lovely to share:

What Do You Think About Paid Stumbling?

Chris Abraham — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 15:23:02 +0000

I quickly realized that StumbleUpon is the coolest and hottest social bookmarking service nobody has heard of. I love it but I don’t nearly use it enough: either as a stumbler or as a marketer. I found this on Blog Marketing Journal and thought I would open it up to you:

In case you are not familiar with the concept, StumbleUpon allows you to pay for visitors to your pages, five cents per visitor or click. The question is, do you consider this to be a simple form of paid advertising, or paid social bookmarking.

I have done some experiments with paid Stumbling and what BMJ says is true:

If you set a limit of $20 per day, you will get 400 visitors. They may stay on your page or they may spend five seconds and disappear. Where the situations changes is when they thumbs up your page. That’s a stumble and can lead to more than just the 400 visitors.

So, in this case, content is key, and good content will result in conversions and interest. If you just throw money at it without thinking your content or strategy through, you will be disappointed with the results, especially since there’s nobody on the planet more savvy than the gang from StumbleUpon — these are earl-adopters and are just the people you want to love you but these are the worse people to piss off. Just because you’re paying to have your content promoted doesn’t mean that people are prevented from digging the content down (thumbs-down) or writing scathing comments.

Either way, I encourage you to install the Firefox or Internet Explorer plugin and start playing with it — you need to register first, of course. I also encourage you to throw some money at the pay-to-play paid StumbleUpon advertising scheme — it is amazing fun and if you have any cool content at all, it is so much more rewarding that trying to game digg or even organically start StumbleLove — if you’re not really into Stumbling (I have friends who actually spend their evenings Stumbling in lieu of TV) then paying to get started is a very good idea and worth a test — you can check out the FAQ first:

Overview
How does StumbleUpon work?
Can I see a demo of StumbleUpon?
What kind of content works well with StumbleUpon?
Where will my content appear?
How can I get Viral Marketing from StumbleUpon?
Do I need to create an ad?
What am I paying for? What do I get?
How is this different from PPC, pops, banners…?
Why doesn’t StumbleUpon do pops, banners…?
How does StumbleUpon prevent click-fraud?
I have a suggestion/question/feature-request, who should I contact?
Is StumbleUpon right for my business?
Features
How can I target a specific audience?
What kind of traffic volume can I expect?
How can I increase how much traffic I get?
Can I set spending/traffic limits?
Can I use tracking code?
My Google Analytics / Urchin stats don’t match. Why the difference?
What frequency caps does StumbleUpon use?
Can I promote multiple URLs?
Can I create multiple campaigns?
How long does it for a new campaign to start?
How can I tell if my campaigns are performing well?
What kind of reporting is available?
I want a Run of Network (RON) campaign – how do I do that?
How do I target just a certain city, but not by topic?
How can I target multiple topics/demographics?
How do StumbleUpon members know that my site has been sponsored?
Can I make any changes to my campaigns?
How long does the review process take?
Content Guidelines
Are there any content restrictions for the URL’s submitted?
Payment
What forms of payment does StumbleUpon accept?
How long before my funds are active and traffic is delivered?
What is the process for requesting a refund?
How long does it take for refunds to be issued?
Your Account
I forgot my password, how do I get it back?
One of my campaigns was not accepted, what can I do?
Can I stop or pause one of my campaigns?
How can I rename my campaigns to better organize them?
What is Approval rating?
Contacting StumbleUpon
Questions about StumbleUpon Advertising?

Do Social Media Solutions Stagnate After Acquisition?

Chris Abraham — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 02:42:08 +0000

While very many media outlets support del.icio.us in their bookmarking and social media strategies, there has been very little innovation in the del.icio.us social bookmarking platform — this has been a major problem with properties that have been acquired by big firms such as AOL, Google, and Yahoo!, in the case of del.icio.us. Allen Stern wrote a very insightful post, Did Delicious Lose Its Chance To Be FriendFeed?, about how FriendFeed has started to take del.icio.us’ lunch based on innovation and creativity:

[...]Had Delicious (and Yahoo) moved faster on the release could they have become what’s hot with FriendFeed today? I get that FriendFeed allows you to share your delicious bookmarks. But what I am talking about here is something much bigger strategically. By “sitting” on the release, the team lost their chance to move the strategy forward.
[...]Had Yahoo wanted to actually take their Delicious investment and do something with it, how hard would it have been to add the same functionality? If we look back a year, Delicious had a much larger “buzz share” than they do today. When I look at the CN logs, we rarely see any traffic from Delicious and haven’t had a frontpage link in probably nine months. Yet in the last week, I’ve seen way more traffic from FriendFeed. Yahoo’s Delicious service has a “close to mainstream” userbase and sure missed a golden opportunity to move forward – a fail whale if you will.
[...]If you look at the topic I’ve discussed here, it’s basically what Fred Wilson discussed when he wrote about stagnation when companies acquire startups. Who will come up next and displace Upcoming and/or Flickr as the techies choice?

Oh, and be sure to join me on FriendFeed as well as del.icio.us!