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Using StumbleUpon Effectively

March 10, 2009

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Social Net­work Mar­ket­ing is cur­rently a hot topic in the world of Inter­net Mar­ket­ing. Many peo­ple want to inte­grate a social media and social net­work­ing com­po­nent to their mar­ket­ing mix. The most com­mon prob­lem I see is Social Media Mar­ket­ing thrown together in an ad hoc fash­ion and poorly executed.

The key risk from a mar­ket­ing per­spec­tive is this: poorly exe­cuted SEO will result in no rank­ings, poorly exe­cuted PPC results in wasted bud­gets, poorly exe­cuted Social Media Mar­ket­ing can result in a bad rep­u­ta­tion, neg­a­tive buzz and angry users.

You need to be very cau­tious when exe­cut­ing a Social Media Mar­ket­ing cam­paign — do not just throw some­thing together and start talk­ing to an online com­mu­nity, the ram­i­fi­ca­tions could be not only worse than you expected they could be dif­fi­cult to undo.

Plan­ning, edu­ca­tion and exe­cu­tion are crit­i­cal to a suc­cess­ful social media pro­gram. I would sug­gest that you con­sider the fol­low­ing points before launch­ing a social media mar­ket­ing program:

  1. Which social media sites will you be tar­get­ing? Is your con­tent appro­pri­ate for that net­work? For exam­ple: Digg is extremely pop­u­lar among tech­nol­ogy and design audi­ences. Stum­ble­Upon is pop­u­lar for humor, enter­tain­ment and gam­ing audi­ences. Newsvine is pop­u­lar among polit­cal junkies (these are fairly sim­plis­tic exam­ples but you get the point).
  2. What voice do you want to project for your prod­uct to these audi­ences? Direct mar­ket­ing doesn’t gen­er­ally work well. Infor­ma­tional, edu­ca­tional and inter­est­ing con­tent is needed with a sub­tle hint towards pro­mot­ing your product.
  3. What are you try­ing to say to the audi­ence? Social Media Mar­ket­ing is really about start­ing an ongo­ing dia­logue with an audi­ence, it’s about build­ing trust rela­tion­ships that are sub­tle. For­mu­lat­ing a mes­sage is extremely impor­tant, con­tin­u­ing the dia­logue in a gen­uine way is crit­i­cal. If you are not going to do that then you need to recon­sider lever­ag­ing this medium.
  4. Social Media Net­works are com­posed of and run by real peo­ple. Remem­ber that. This is not tra­di­tional adver­tis­ing. You are devel­op­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with real people.
  5. Be pre­pared to hear things you may not like. You may get no reac­tion. You may in fact get a neg­a­tive reac­tion. Ensure that you know how to deal with a neg­a­tive reac­tion and always remem­ber that some­one who gives you a reac­tion is some­one who cares. Engage them and sort it out, it will be worth it!
  6. Be pre­pared to engage the com­mu­nity as a com­mu­nity mem­ber. Par­tic­i­pate in a very real way, if you do any less your pro­grams will not succeed.

Although I’ve gone off on a tan­gent slightly, I am lay­ing the ground work for this screen­cast and dis­cussing one of my favorite sites: Stum­ble­Upon. I’m not going to intro­duce Stum­ble­upon in this arti­cle, I do that in the screen­cast below. You can also learn about Stum­ble­Upon right here.

So enjoy the screen­cast and I’m sure I’ve missed some­thing in my overview so let me know by leav­ing a com­ment. Click Play and watch my screen­cast on Stum­ble­upon, you might find it useful!

Get the Flash Player to see the word­Tube Media Player.

If you are already on Stum­ble­Upon or ready to join and get into it, add me to your friend list or sub­scribe to my stumbles.

Happy Stum­bling!

Dan Nedelko

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Written by Dan Nedelko · Filed Under Features, Internet Marketing, Screencasts, Social Networking 

Comments

One Response to “Using StumbleUpon Effectively”

  1. Gabriel on March 3rd, 2010 12:00 am

    Social net­work­ing sites and social book­mark­ing sites are being used by most web­mas­ters in their link build­ing strate­gies. The effec­tive­ness of which are already proven by expe­ri­enced inter­net mar­keters too.

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