Going Viral On StumbleUpon.com - A Case Study On Targeting Stumble Users
If you’re like me, you’re summarily addicted to StumbleUpon.com. Stumble is a user driven, website submission and rating system that helps people discover new interesting stuff on the web.
Stumble has managed to capture nearly seven million avid “stumblers.” Every day, stumblers happily meander an impressive index of sites deemed worthy by their peers.
How Does It Work?
According to Stumble’s website, “StumbleUpon uses 
/ 
ratings to form collaborative opinions on website quality. When you stumble, you will only see pages which friends and like-minded stumblers (
) have recommended. This helps you discover great content you probably wouldn’t find using a search engine.”
Simply put, website’s are added to the Stumble directory when a Stumble user rates a page.
Other stumblers are later directed (pseudo)randomly to the recently submitted site.
These new visitors can also rate the site with a thumbs up or down. The more “thumbs up” the site gets, the more stumble users are directed there. Less popular sites are buried and shown infrequently.
This is a simplified overview of StumbleUpon. At the core, Stumble engineers have packed their platform with plenty of “smarts”.
Stumble is good about showing users sites they’re likely to be interested in. The more you vote, the smarter it gets.
Why Marketers Love Stumble?
Stumble can be a great source of traffic for your site. SEO experts and web marketers have been leveraging StumbleUpon since its inception.
If a few stumblers like your site and thumbs it up, Stumble will continue to send a steady stream of traffic there. If enough of those visitors in turn also give your site a thumbs up, the effect can snowball.
Sites can become “viral” on Stumble.
Unlike landing on the front page of other user ranking sites (like Digg.com or Slashdot.org, known as getting slashdotted) where traffic peaks for a day then subsides, successful Stumble sites enjoy a steady stream of visitors for a long time.
This makes it an ideal strategic marketing tool, and StumbleUpon.com knows it (more on this later).
Why It’s Hard To Go Viral On Stumble
The challenge with Stumble users is sometimes they get so caught up in the act of stumbling, they forget to rate the sites they’re visiting.
Stumbling at its core is a sort of thoughtless task. You, the user, sit clicking a button and waiting in anticipation for the next potentially exciting site to wow (or bore) you. You really have to catch a user’s attention to get them to remember that little rating button again.
Or, you can ask them nicely.
How To Beg For Stumbles
Stumble has a neat feature where you can get a nice little stumble button for your web site that lets your visitors easily submit your page to the Stumble directory.
Stumble It!This is the de facto method of soliciting for stumbles.
The problem with this technique is that not all your visitors are stumblers and even if they are, they’re busy stumbling, remember! If they can’t remember to click their own tool bar thumbs-up, they’re just as unlikely to notice yours.
Overcoming The Stumble Coma
Instead of pasting a button on your page and praying you get the attention of your visitors, you can take a more proactive approach. This is what Mesiab Labs recently did with our new Comic and Political Satire site Smartoons.net with astounding results. Here’s what we did.
Our initial plan was based on three simple premises:
1.) Most stumblers need to be reminded to thumbs up your page.
2.) Not all users are stumblers, non Stumble users should not be bothered.
3.) Don’t lose the visitor to the Stumble rating page.
Accomplishing these tasks were relatively straightforward.
The Nag Box
To start, we created a simple light-box interface that pops up over our site and asks a user to contribute a stumble rating.
When a user clicks the familiar Stumble button, we load the resulting StumbleUpon.com rating page inside a convenient iframe to complete the voting process.
The light-box/iframe approach ensures we provide a stream-lined user experience while simultaneously retaining the user on our site. We also provide a few ways for the user to “opt-out” of this request and visit our site without casting a vote.
Targeting Stumble Users
For obvious reasons, we don’t want to inundate non-Stumble users with our nag screen. Because of its irrelevance to their browsing experience, the nag screen becomes a nuisance instead of a “polite reminder” for anyone who’s not stumbling.
This means we need to identify Stumble users from normal users and present our nag screen with prejudice. To achieve this, we inspect the referrer header of every page request, looking for the following referrer pattern: http://www.stumbleupon.com/refer.php
Sample PHP Code:
/* This function determines whether or not a user
* was directed to our site from Stumble
*/
function came_from_stumble()
{
return preg_match(”/http:\/\/www.stumbleupon.com\/refer.php/i”, $_SERVER["HTTP_REFERER"]);
}
Yes, It Really Is That Easy
To get the most out of our stumble users, we implement one last technique. Since Smartoons.net is an index of comics and itself has many thousands of internal pages. We wanted to get as many of our pages into the stumble index as possible.
To accomplish this, we redirect Stumble users to a random comic when they arrive via stumble, then present the nag screen. This method ensures that each time a visitor stumbles to our site, they add a new Smartoons.net page to the Stumble index.
This screen shot shows an entire google page of results from Smartoons, all submitted to the StumbleUpon index. This capture and push-to-promote technique leads to exponential returns on your Stumble marketing efforts.
This technique has bolstered Smartoons, for instance, to over 2k uniques a day in under two weeks in beta release.
Next week, I’ll discuss how Mesiab Labs implemented the Facebook Connect API, leveraging Facebook’s over 150 Million users.
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