It is no secret that I am a big fan of StumbleUpon. For bringing high numbers of qualified traffic to a web site, I do not think that there is a better social networking site than StumbleUpon.
Like any social networking site, StumbleUpon can easily get overrun by spam. That is why I found so the post Share Your Stuff: Effectively and Ethically Submitting Pages to StumbleUpon & Stumblers so interesting.
In the article, the author gives x suggestions to how to effectively use StumbleUpon without spamming them. The tips are:
Interesting article on Digital Inspiration titled How to Submit Multiple URLs to del.icio.us Bookmarks as a Batch. The first question you might have is why would I want to submit all my pages to Del.icio.is which is a pretty good question. The author’s answer to that question was:
There are some very genuine reasons for submitting bookmarks in bulk - for instance, bloggers can put all their blog posts onto del.icio.us to know which posts are most popular among delicious users and what kind of tags / text notes are users attaching to their posts. It’s like a good visual analysis of your blog site.
Digital Inspiration recently had a couple of good articles on how to better use Del.icio.us. One that is great for competitive research and it lets you know when people bookmark you on Del.icio.us.
When someone bookmarks a competitor’s site (or your web site) you can read the notes and tags that people attach to there site while saving it on del.icio.us gives a fairly good idea about what they think of your blog and/or web site.
You can find this information at delicious.com/url and type the URL of your blog.
The results page shows all the delicious users who have bookmarked you, what tags they used to describe your site and user notes, if any.
We are really excited that social media leader Neil Patel has agreed to be the interviewed in our social media optimization series.
Neil Patel is the founder of Advantage Consulting Services which was started in 2002. He has lead Internet marketing strategies for small and medium sized businesses as well as top companies such as Hewlett Packard and Wal-Mart.
In the interview Neil talks about his thoughts on social media as well as what SMO strategies he is advising clients to use, and which ones to avoid.
In browsing and stumbling this week I came across a wide variety of interesting, insightful, thought provoking and funny social media posts. Some of the best ones were:
It’s the end of a very interesting week. On Monday we kicked off the week with an interview with Cameron Olthuis. Cameron gave some really insightful answers. I asked Cameron what has been the biggest surprise to him about the growth of social media. His answer was:
The biggest surprise to me is that many big brands and industries have failed to recognize this trend and leverage it. Take the surfing industry for example: many of the big lifestyle brands in that industry have large followings and crazy brand evangelists that would be perfect for social media marketing, yet none of them have recognized this trend or leveraged it properly. That whole industry needs a kick in the ass when it comes to online marketing.
How to measure the effectiveness of a social media campaign is a topic that has spawned thousands of blog posts, many of which throw up a mathematical formula that would give Einstein pause to think.
One of the better ideas about how to measure social media was written by Mike Manuel titled Social Media Measurement Deconstructed. Mike basically says that you measure the effectiveness of a social media campaign by focusing on three things:
- Influence
- Engagement
- Reach
I agree that Engagement needs to be on the list. Engagement according to Mike consists of:
Everyone is looking to create buzz online, so it is no surprise to hear that Petco is using user-submitted videos in its latest marketing campaign.
The contest, a variation of America’s funniest pet tricks, asked people to upload to Petco’s web site a one-minute video of their dog or cat performing the winning pet trick. Petco then had their site visitors vote on their favorite video to decide the contest winner, who received a trip for two to Los Angeles and a role for the pet in an upcoming Petco advertising campaign. Not a bad deal.
We are really excited that social media leader Cameron Olthuis has agreed to be the interviewed in our social media optimization series. Cameron is CEO of a media startup that is currently in stealth mode and his blog is a must read for anyone interested in social media ad search.
Cameron, you are one of the early evangelists of social media optimization. Can you tell me about your decision get involved in this market?
This was another packed week. What ever happened to the July-August slowdown? Luckily for us Lee Odden, CEO of TopRank® Online Marketing agreed to be interviewed about how TopRank uses social media tactics to distinguish itself in the market, plus how TopRank’s clients are using social media to grow their business online. The interview was so good we had to break it into two parts? You can read part one here and part two here.
First we asked Lee whether his blog has helped generate new business. His answer was:
