Review of a Successful StumbleUpon
14 September 2007At 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.
Leave a reply
Additional comments powered by BackType
