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Today’s guest blog post from Vanessa Buendia, journalism graduate and recent intern at Staniforth London, deals with her nocturnal social media habit: StumbleUpon.

For an insomniac like me sleepless nights used to be incredibly boring. However, for more than two years now they’ve become something of a delight.

As soon as I notice that Mr Sandman has once again forgotten my address, I reach out for my computer. Once I’ve opened my Mozilla Firefox I go ahead and click on that little green and blue button on the left hand corner of my browser and travel to the exhilarating universe that is StumbleUpon.

Whatever happens next is totally out of my control; it’s all in the hands of algorithms and more than 7.5 million of my peers. With that little button, instead of surfing the net in the calm waters of a traditional search engine, I ride a Tsunami-sized wave of information and interesting pages. All I have to do in return is vote whether or not I’ve liked the visited site and hence help my fellow surfers experience the same internet quality.

There’s been quite a number of webpages which have bought traffic from StumbleUpon and similar bookmarking services and made a success of themselves. With SU rates as low as just $0.05 per visitor it’s definitely worth a try. So how is it then that an industry as avant-garde as PR has almost completely ignored them?

Well I’m sure many have tried but failed. The thing with SU is that you are not sending out a press release to a newspaper. You are not selling your story to a journalist. You are talking directly to your audience and if you do not fulfil their expectations they have the power to vote you out of the system and leave you to die in the arid wasteland of oblivion (you know where that is, it’s the resting place for brilliant ideas such as the New Coke and Green Ketchup).

As a result, when you’ve finished your campaign you’ll know exactly how much impact you’ve had and you’ll have an exact number of how many people liked it or not.

So how does one become a successful bookmark? Well first of all you should try the service yourself. As soon as you start using it you’ll learn the first and most important rule in bookmarking: it’s all about the content!

The real challenge of SU is that you’re audience has to like you and their taste is much more sophisticated than you could have ever imagined. So if you don’t target your audience correctly and entice them with exciting visual aids or multimedia, chances are they are going to vote you out soon. It’s all about being the popular guy on campus.

A good thing about SU is that you can buy small amounts of traffic and start test driving your campaign. Then with the results obtained you can optimise it until you get it just right.

However, the biggest perk that bookmarking sites have is the fact that you can cut out the middle man and directly impact your audience. You will get to start a bilateral relationship with them and you get to learn exactly what they need from you.

One thing is for sure, after trying the service you’ll be surprised with the feedback you get.

Tags: bookmarking, bookmarking sites, online content, StumbleUpon

This entry was posted on Monday, November 2nd, 2009 at 9:27 am and is filed under Social Media, Social Network. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.