I Stumbled Upon This Flying Dog

There are more social media sites I am able to shake a stick at.  If you knew how incredibly proficient I am at stick shaking, you would know that is a bunch. Yesterday I wanted to look at the benefits of a fun little place called StumbledUpon.

It is a clever name, to be sure. This is the concept. Every day there are literally well over 13 - 14 new pages of content on the internet. Well Over! So what do you do if you don't have time to find the new stuff? You leave it up to the wisdom of the herd.

Much like herd of cattle, who are naturally predisposed to move towards pictures of cats with light sabers, the internet herds behave in a similar fashion. StumbleUpon allows one to create an account, then simply hit a button and they will go out and get a coral a page of fun from the world wide web and deliver it straight to you computer, free of charge, no tip required.

So imagine that tomorrow you wake up feeling absolutely sure there are all sorts of new bits of internet goodness, flying dogs, dancing marsupials, and lists of the mundane. You are thinking you might really enjoy a flying dog picture or a cup of mundane and so you sign on to StumbleUpon and hit the button. There it is! Fun...or not so fun.

Sometimes, one person's flying dog, is another person's bag of wet cheese, and so, depending upon your view, you may choose to 'Like' it or give it the old thumbs down. This is where the herd comes in. If the flying dog picture is well liked, then there is a greater likelihood that it will get delivered when someone hits the 'Stumble' button. If people don't care for it, then it is put out to pasture with the poorly cropped picture of something which is definitely NOT a Yeti.

When one signs up they are able to indicate preferences for which type of internet tom foolery they wish to be bombarded with, even going so far as to allow one to get serious news and political mumbo jumbo.  I seriously advise against getting serious news.

The question on your mind, aside from, 'Why am I reading this again?' is, 'How does this help me promote my brand,blog or pet snack bakery?' This was the question on my mind as well, 'How do I get my stuff into the mix and will it matter?'

I wondered over to my account, ExtremelyAverage and found the 'Add a site' button. Next I choose an old post from my blog at http://extremelyaverage.com and entered it into the system. It then asked me to add some tags, which is how it decides where to fling the post. There are 9.8 million people who use StumbleUpon, so I assumed that there might be a few who would find me.

My previous best day was 137 visits.  I had posted it at 3:30 pm and over the next 3 hours, 83 new people came to my silly blog.  The best part is that they choose to hang out a bit.  The bounce rate was 4.82%, and they viewed 9.89 pages per visit.  My final tally for the day was a new record at 232 visitors.  This is just shy of my friend who has had 270 visitors.  So I feel that I may be able to use StumbleUpon to pass him.  Of course, I have already showed him how to use it, so his old record may not be the mark to beat for much longer.  I digress.

The point is that it did drive some traffic to the site.  Is one test a statistically significant event?  No. But that is where you folks come in.  If you have arrived here via the link I put out in emails or on Twitter, please use the 'Like' at the top.  If you didn't like it, you are free to thumbs down me too, though that would be mean and cruel and likely lead to global warming, but it is really up to you.

I will then write a follow up post with the results.  Assuming that getting 'likes' helps, then we will see if the traffic to this site has changed.  Since this isn't my real blog, and I rarely get more than about 10 people per day, it should be a good test.  Until the next time, thanks for stumbling on over to my blog and if you should choose to join StumbledUpon, feel free to look me up, I will be the ExtremelyAverage cow in the herd, next to the blurry Yeti [not pictured]