StumbleUpon - Amusing or worthwhile? Yes.

When StumbleUpon first launched many, many years ago, I thought it was just a gimmick. It is, essentially, a browser toolbar for Internet Explorer or Firefox (the Firefox extension has seen 3,695,298 downloads — with 37,458 this week alone) that allows you to visit Web sites at random. To me, StumbleUpon was right up there with typing in a random word on Google and clicking “I’m feeling lucky”. But if the information superhighway has taught me one thing, it is that humans have an infinite amount of time to waste…and are always looking for ways to get their Website visited.

Just came across an article by Neil Patel describing how you can increase your StumbleUpon audience. That lead me to check out his previous article on the matter, How to get StumbledUpon. Neil, you’ve opened my eyes — I’m a convert.

See, dear readers, there are two key parts to StumbleUpon: The whole random Website thing, and a voting system. If you like one of the sites you’ve stumbled onto you give it a thumbs up. Don’t like it, thumbs down. The more thumbs up a site gets, the more likely it is to be visited by others. And you can even magnify this effect but hooking up with other people in communities, or voting frequently and improving your own ability to influence the system.

What you can do
Does your client or PR firm have a blog? I think you need to get everyone in the firm to install the StumbleUpon toolbar to their browser, get hooked up to a single community, and spend five minutes each day giving a strategic selection of Websites a thumbs up…and thumbs down, as the case may be.

And don’t just focus on your blog, or your client’s Website. Targeting sites with tangential interests to your own can be advantageous from a relationship building perspective, particularly if you’re sponsoring them or are partnered up.

Regardless, click on over to Neil Patel’s articles, linked in paragraph two, and give them a read. In the meantime, I’m going to check out the similar-but-different Yoono extension …