Review of a Successful StumbleUpon
Written on 14 September 2007 by marshallclarkAt the start of August I launched a Viral/Social marketing campaign for one of my clients, a science news program. The marketing campaign was designed around a website parody of the Creation Museum - a $27 Million facility in Kentucky designed to teach the Biblical truth of creationism. Our parody site, called the Unicorn Museum, poked fun at these religious fundamentalists by insisting that if the creation myth was real then unicorns must be too (fact: unicorns are mentioned 9 times in the KJV Bible).
Anyway, the site was promoted through all the usual social/viral channels and got over 150k pageviews in the first three weeks (despite getting buried within 2 hours of hitting Digg). The client was thrilled, I thought we could have done better, but the real surprise once the dust settled was the traffic we got back from StumbleUpon.
When we launched the site in the second week of August, we did a small seeding campaign on SU and saw some modest results with a peak of 2612 users on August 10. The site had been reviewed by about 20 SU users and we were seeing good performance numbers from the visitors hitting the site. We thought we were done on StumbleUpon.
Turns out we were wrong. SU traffic started to pick up again on August 23, and by August 25 we were seeing over 5700 SU users/day. Total StumbleUpon traffic for August totaled 21,307.
So what happened? Well, SU content can be viewed a number of ways (through the toolbar, SU website groups, friend recommendations, etc). One popular way to use the service is to manually visit SU blogs of popular users. Top SU posters typically have thousands of fans, each of whom may have several hundred additional fans beneath them. In our case a SU user with about 2000 fans wrote a review of the Unicorn Museum website on their SU blog. This in turn lead a number of other SU users to also add reviews and link back to the site. This process snowballed over the course of three days and resulted in a considerable number of visits from StumbleUpon.
What we’ve learned from this process is that it’s not enough to just post your content on SU and get a bunch of people review it. Reviews from people that are respected in the StumbleUpon community are the key and will result in a surprising amount of traffic. It’s true that SU is not very intuitive to use or promote through, but as myself and a number of other marketers have written recently, the results are definitely worth the effort.
George W. Bush Is Once Again A ‘Failure’
Written on 7 April 2007 by marshallclark
By now most of you are familiar with the original George W. Bush ‘miserable failure‘ Google Bomb.
On January 25, 2007 Google announced that it was making adjustments to prevent Google Bombing. Immediately following this announcement, the Bush Google Bomb and several other GBs including one for Tony Blair and the word “liar” disappeared from the rankings, prompting some SEOs to wonder if these adjustments were a hand-tweak of the results.
Based on results posted today on ThreadWatch however, it looks like the adjustment was in fact algorithmic - as Bush is once again ranking as a top ‘failure‘. In an amusing twist, Bush may have actually managed to ‘rebomb’ himself.
On the President's page at WhiteHouse.gov there's a 'Latest Headlines' section that lists news relating to GW. As you can see from the screen capture, one of the stories was on Congress' "failure" to approve emergency supplementary funding to the troops in Iraq. If you search on Google you'll see that the GW page has now climbed up to the #1 for 'failure'.
Based on these results, it appears Google's recent anti-Google Bombing adjustment may have been nothing more that a filter to prevent pages from ranking for inbound anchor-text terms when theterms are not present on the page. This would effectively prevent third parties from ranking a page for defamatory terms, provided of course that the owner of the page didn't then go and inadvertently place the offending words on the page themselves. Ow.
Now if WhiteHouse.gov would just post an "impeachment" story...
Project Apollo: Old Media is Watching
Written on 2 April 2007 by marshallclark
Project Apollo is a cross-platform analytics program being developed by Proctor & Gamble with Arbitron and Nielsen that will track all aspects of customers’ advertising consumption and product purchasing behavior. Apollo is the response to mainstream media’s difficulty tracking advertising effectiveness in an increasingly fragmented world of podcasts, satellite TV, time-shifted content, and decentralized user-generated media.While no doubt useful to large advertisers, the almost omniscient level of data delivered by Apollo is concerning and has considerable privacy implications should its use ever become widespread.
Project Apollo aims to provide “a day in the life” of an average media user. Continue »
StumbleUpon and Social Media Marketing
Written on 2 April 2007 by marshallclarkGreat post today on SEL about how even small businesses can use social media to get noticed. Matt McGee lists six good places to start:
- Start a blog/Comment on other blogs
- Get active at Yahoo Answers
- Make and share videos
- Take and share photos
- Try StumbleUpon
- Join groups & mailing lists
From my experience doing promotional work for the This Week in Science podcast I can attest to the effectiveness of StumbleUpon for good quality traffic. With TWIS we were lucky to have a site that was rich in non-commercial content, but the same strategies we used could probably be employed for most websites with some degree of success. Continue »
Current TV Takes ‘User-Generated’ One-Step Further
Written on 21 November 2006 by marshallclark
Current TV pioneered the user-generated content bandwagon, and this time they’re back with something just a little bit different - user generated TV ads. Current’s new VCAM program (short for Viewer Created Ad Message) appears to modeled after the success of unsolicited user generated videos such as the McDonald’s Drive Through Song. As with other user-generated content plays, the originator of the content is paid sub-market rate in return for the recognition of having their piece aired in front of an audience. Current TV currently pays a $1000 flat rate if a user’s ad is run on TV. Continue »
