StumbleUpon is one of the most popular sites when it comes to getting your page to go viral. For everyday websites, it is more popular than Digg or any of the other social sites.

One feature that StumbleUpon has that most other sites do not have is the ability to ‘buy’ traffic - yes - ‘buy’ traffic. You do not have to fight for keywords nor do you have to pay a premium for popular keywords. The traffic you buy can be targeted to your niche.

The cost - a measly five cents per click - a lot less than some of the other pay-per-click alternatives. The traffic that is delivered is targeted and those visitors, being StumbleUpon users, have the power to give your content the thumbs up (or down). You may ‘buy’ 100 visitors for a cost of $5 and find that you actually receive 150 or more - this is due to the thumbing of your content.

Is it worth the effort? Your traffic may well be targeted, however, like most StumbleUpon campaigns, the traffic is often hit and run. You will find your bounce rate hovering around the 70-90%. Conversion rates from this traffic can be quite low. However, if you are selling products with a high buy price and high margin, then you will probably be used to a low conversion rate. At five cents per visitor, you may only need one conversion per 100 to come out well in front.

Buying traffic from StumbleUpon is not for everyone. However for some website owners, the outlay may be worth the effort. One side benefit to using StumbleUpon like this is that your Alexa rating will improve sharply. The statistics page for purchased traffic is fairly basic although it does display a percentage of how many visitors liked your page. This could be handy for market research purposes particularly if you have several different landing pages that you would like to trial.

Buying a viral campaign - now that’s different - but then, that’s StumbleUpon.

Social marketing is all about getting yourself, your site and your products/services out there in the public domain. To this end, should your social content be natural or should you manufacture your content to suit the social environment?

Critics would argue that once your social content strays from what is natural for your site, you will start to look contrived. Of course, if the masses start to feel that your input is contrived, you will lose all credibility and find yourself in a virtual void - the social networks version of being ’sent to Coventry’.

Others would argue that almost everything that happens in a social marketing environment is contrived and that any social content delivered to these sites has already been manufactured.

Both arguments are valid and it is fairly obvious that once you lose credibility, you will lose any following. However it is also obvious to any frequent observer that most of the social content on offer at present has had some tweaking done to make it more socially acceptable and, hopefully, a little more viral.

However, in the bigger picture, who doesn’t tweak their content. Whether it is for search engine optimization purposes, social networking or to simply drag visitors into your site, web site owners have been touching up their content for many years. Social content is just another vehicle to explore.

For most web site owner, getting the balance between content for social marketing purposes and content for customer satisfaction is always going to be difficult. Throw in the SEO needs for your site and writing good content, be it social content, general marketing content or basic customer product content has become an art form.

Perhaps the real key is to prepare your content in a natural style that is suited to your site and your niche; then tweak it for social marketing purposes. Don’t overdo it and you will have the best of all worlds.

Social Marketing is no different to marketing in general. If look at some of the principles from Intro to Marketing 101 you will see that they can be applied to social marketing with good results.

1. Talk - and listen - to the people you are trying to reach. Go to where the people are and talk to them.
2. Segment your audience - it can be difficult to totally segment your audience. You can however segment your audience into general age groupings and genre interests.
3. Position yourself - learn the benefits your prospective audience values most
4. Know your competition - be aware of the competing messages that are out there
5. Go to where your audience is - it is no good going to social sites if your target audience is not there. Select sites that your target audience gather.
6. Build Partnerships - find key allies that you can partner with.

When it comes to social marketing, knowing your target audience, where they gather and who you can partner with is a basic essential. From there you can slowly build on your network, slowly gathering credibility, building strong partnerships, and placing yourself in a position where you can promote yourself and your product or service with trust.

Social marketing is hardly different from basic marketing in the bricks and mortar world. It is the delivery method and delivery vehicles that are different.

Social marketing is gaining interest in the commercial world at rapid rate and it is not surprising that niche micro social networks are now becoming popular.

Peter Bowman’s article on micro social networks published on Internet Evolution provides a good insight into the direction the new networks are heading.

As social marketing becomes popular it becomes harder and harder to get noticed. With millions using these networks and the categories moving into the hundreds, gaining credibility within your niche has not only become super competitive, it has become extremely spam ridden.

As Bowman’s article points out:

However, many members get the feeling of becoming lost in crowds of millions. Micro-social spaces offer less diversity to users, but directly identify with their specific desires and interests.

This will become the key to social networking through these micro networks. Each network serves a particular niche drawing individuals from both sides of the commercial fence. This concept is not new. In the past, forums have served very well as niche networks, however the very term forum seems to turn people off. Call the site a social network, or better yet, call it a social bookmarking site and people will come in their droves.

Bowman’s opening paragraph really sums up the trend where he states:

…..they mirror what micro-sites have done to promote brands for many years. Will this growing micro-social trend dilute the existing power of social network elites like Facebook and MySpace , or will they empower more people to participate in a wider selection of online communities based on their individual needs and wants?

The future of micro social networks will be interesting to watch particularly as larger corporations make more use of the concept and develop their own networks. As social marketing opportunities there may be obstacles put in place as the micro network owners try to protect their ‘turf’ by preventing many of the marketing opportunities that are available through the larger networks.

It will be interesting to see how they balance their own needs with those of the social marketing users and the needs of the general public at large - ultimately their own customers.

Reputation management is not always about what you do with your site. It is not always what you don’t do either. Sometimes it is a good idea to sit back and watch what your competitors are doing. Often you can learn much either from their successes or, more importantly, their failures.

I shouldn’t just limit that statement to your competitors either. Just watching others from within your genre can be interesting.

What is more important is to listen to what is being said about your competitors. Sometimes you can find a real opportunity when you start to hear complaints about what your competitors are not doing - or perhaps, what they are doing that is upsetting customers.

Likewise, if you are a product distributor, what is being said about that product? Discovering this information early can have you well placed to answer concerns from prospective customers.

Reputation management is as much about listening as it is about doing. Spending time reviewing what is being said can save you the discomfort of unpleasant surprises; provide you with an opportunity to prepare; and perhaps even provide new opportunities.

Learn to listen, learn to watch, learn to read the reputation management social environment.

For every positive there is an equal and opposite negative. At least, thats what I was taught at school - well something like that anyway. It runs true to social bookmarking sites as well. Often, no matter how many places your submit your site too, it may just take time to see any results.

I said there were positives and negatives. For many sites, social bookmarking can bring very good results very quickly. For other sites, the progress may be a little slower - and that is the downside.

There is one unarguable fact when it comes to the internet, some genres are simply more popular than others. Any content devoted to marketing, SEO, celebrities, cars and wide range of topics are going to be popular. If you site is devoted to less popular genres like mens ties (do people still wear them) or mens underwear (yes - we do still wear them - sometimes) then you are going to struggle to get visitors. It is no different when it comes to social bookmarking.

If you can accept that some genres are more popular than others then you can see that even i social bookmarking sites, there is going to be a similar balance of popular and not so popular genres. The popular sites are going to get instant action. The not so popular sites are not going to get that same ‘instant action’.

This does not mean that sites that sit in the not so popular categories should ignore social bookmarking (or any other form of marketing for that matter). It does mean that often you are going to have to work a little harder for smaller results. However, social bookmarking delivers more than just traffic. The long term benefit of social bookmarking is the increase in the number of inbound one-way links - since these sites have fairly high rankings, that is some valuable link juice you are receiving.

If your business or web site sits in an unpopular category, don’t discard social bookmarking as an option. The benefits down the track will be invaluable.

I was reminded today of what a double edged sword forum communities can be. On the one hand, niche related forums can be a great place to hang out and build a reputation. However, as we mentioned in a previous post, push to hard or work to fast and you will find your reputation management strategies have been totally wasted.

Forum communities have been around much longer than any of the current social bookmarking sites, some are older than the world wide web (www) itself. Used judiciously, these forums can be very beneficial, particularly if you have a highly specialized web sites.

It is quite a paradox when you consider normal bricks and mortar business communities. They tend to spend most of their time trying to outdo each other; trying to get that business edge that brings the customer to their door rather than yours. With forum communities it is almost the opposite. Rather than seeing each other as commercial rivals, members of these communities relate to each other with a true community spirit - perhaps a legacy of the traditional pre www forum days.

With this in mind, your approach to any forum needs to be on the basis of participation. Forum communities are a great source of information particularly when it comes to product problems (and their solutions), current trends and corporate gossip. You would be surprised at how many product recalls are started because of problems identified by members of a forum. Listening to corporate gossip, while generally just that, gossip, can at times give you a head start on your commercial rivals.

Whilst most forums provide you with profile pages similar to bookmarking sites, forums often also allow signatures where you can place information such as your web address. These signatures are automatically added every time your post a comment or ask a question. Social bookmarking sites rarely allow such blatant promotion.

Other major benefits include the question and answer processes. Forum communities exist primarily as information tools. They are ideal places to canvas solutions for problems you may be experiencing in your particular field. It is similar to having a team of experts in a room. Throw in a problem and sit back and watch the debate. Eventually you will have a range of solutions most of which have been tried and tested. The more reliable participants talk from experience.

Once you start participating in these debates, you will find two things happening. First, you can become hooked. Secondly, if you talk from experience and can demonstrate a knowledge of the topic, you will be looked upon as an equal who can be trusted. From there, the benefits of belonging to forum communities will truly come to the surface.

Forum communities could be considered old fashioned. The results can be slow in bearing fruit however the amount of fruit eventually gathered could be equal to, or greater than, many of the social bookmarking sites. Don’t brush them aside to readily - fruit is fruit.

When it comes to Web 2.0. social networking is not only all the rage, it is the rage. If you haven’t got into the swing of things yet, it’s not too late - you may just have to get into some speed dating to catch up. How quickly can you become involved in the social networking game, it’s totally up to you. Here are my six P’s that may help you catch the field.

1. Popularity - join sites that are already popular. These are the mainstream sites that have a lot of traffic.
2. Profile - develop a profile that is interesting and will entice visitors to add you to their friend lists. Don’t go overboard but at the same time, don’t be too brief.
3. Photo - grab a good photo of yourself and add it to your profile. If you don’t feel comfortable with your photo, find an avatar that looks attractive.
4. Pictures - add pictures, graphics, videos and any other artwork that puts you into the web 2.0 crowd.
5. Promote - promote yourself whenever possible. If necessary, pester your friends, relatives and colleagues to get online and add you to their friend lists.
6. Participate - get into the crowd and start participating. Read and vote on articles. Take part in discussions or debates. Get to know some of the top players and get on first name terms with them

Follow these social networking guidelines and you will improve your chances of being noticed quickly. The faster you are noticed, the more connections you will make. Once you start making connections, become judicious as to who you do and do not accept into your contacts list. Do a little research before adding them and only add them if they are going to improve your profile within that site.

If you notice the same contacts on other sites, don’t be too quick to dismiss them. If you friend them on one site then it is a good idea to add them on any other sites as well.

Once you have made your presence felt within a social networking site, you can start to ease back on the social and start to work on your marketing. Like all dating games, don’t rush, don’t push, just ease your way into it. And you thought I was going to help you with ’speed dating’ - sorry, the last date I had was in a packet.

We have business plans, marketing plans and financial plans. Do we need a social marketing plan? There are so many quality social marketing sites now that it would make sense to develop a plan similar to your business or marketing plan.

Having such a broad range of social marketing web sites available to choose from, you need to decide which sites take priority, which sites need a lot of interaction and which sites can be utilized with a minimum of interaction. Having the determined the priority and interaction needs to you can then develop a plan to help you fully optimize your activities. It seems pointless to spend hours on one site with little return when that time could have been better spent on another site with far better results.

A social marketing plan can also help you to focus on the where, when and how of submissions. Where you submit content can depend very much on the focus of the content itself. Some sites don’t like being spammed so you may need to be judicious on when and what you submit. With some sites there may be more value in having friends, colleagues or social contacts submitting content on your behalf. Your social marketing plan can help in determining how this could be achieved with a minimum of fuss or confusion.

Do you have a business plan? Do you have a marketing plan? More importantly; do you have a social marketing plan?

In today’s busy world, social marketing has become an art form in its own right. There are specialist who spend their entire working day helping others to optimize their social marketing strategies to gain the most leverage possible over their rival. Many of these specialists develop social marketing plans for their clients as a guide to their day to day social marketing activities.

“And everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go.” - from the nursery rhyme, “Mary Had a Little Lamb”

If Mary = online technology, then the Lamb = Mashable. If you want to be in on everything in Web 2.0 from the beginning, subscribe to the Mashable feed. You’ll get a bite of information about everything happening in the tech world. You can skim 98% of it quickly, and you can click on a link for the other 2% that really applies to you. Very useful tool.

One feature that you will regularly find some gems in is the Mashable interview. Mark Hopkins goes all over the Web 2.0 landscape to find great, useful information. Some examples of what Mark presented at Mashable in the last week of March:

JamBase: 10 years online, a database of 1 million listings, the original social network for live music lovers & producers. Interviewed the owner of JamBase on how a long-time website adapts to the constantly changing social media.

FriendFeed: Mark talked with FriendFeed founders, Paul Buchheit and Bret Taylor about their new FriendFeed API service.

crowdSPRING: a virtual marketplace to find the creative talent to do any digital job you can think of. Mark interviews Co-founders Ross Kimbarovsky and Mike Sampson to find how they have taken the idea of sites like GetAFreelancer and eLance to a whole new level.

Tremor Media: a video advertising company targeting mid- to large-size publishers. Jason Glickman, Tremor CEO, talks about the challenges of video advertising.

Kidzui: New browser targeted for kids age 6 to 11, Mark interviews AJ, his 6-year-old son, and has him play with the browser for an hour and give his thoughts and experiences.

If you want a wide-view lens capture of Web 2.0, go to Mashable and get their feed. It’s a must.

“As always with WordPress, we don’t claim any of these features to be perfect, or to be better than everyone else in the world, but they are done by and for the people and the one thing we do promise is that with every release we listen and do our best to improve.” - Matt Mullenwegg, founding developer of WordPress

WordPress 2.5 gives you many new options in your social blogging. Here is a partial list of the upgrades:

• Cleaner, faster, better organized,less cluttered dashboard lets you really focus on your blog
• Dashboard Widgets
  • Fun stats about your posting
  • Latest comments
  • Who links to you
  • New and popular plugins
  • WordPress news
  • (Customize any widgets to show, e.g., news from your local paper instead of WP news)
• Multi-file upload with progress bar
• Search both posts AND pages — perfect solution if you use WordPress as a content management system
• Tag management — Add, rename, delete, tags, no plugins needed
• Password strength meter
• Few-click plugin upgrades — automatic download & installation of plug-in upgrades
• Friendlier visual post editor — it doesn’t mess with your code anymore
• Built-in galleries — you can embed whole galleries of photos in a post
• Salted passwords — much greater protection against hackers
• Secure cookies
• Inline documentation — explains functions and when to use them
• Database optimization — the process is now a bit faster
• Improved “Add Media” button function

If something goes wrong in your social blogging, it’s probably a plug-in causing a javascript error. A new button allows you to turn off all your plug-ins, then turn them back on one by one.

There’s more. You can read the complete, detailed list of Wordpress 2.5 social blogging features.

Social networking is all about value and respect. If you provide good value, you will get respect … and traffic. If you provide questionable - or negative - value, then the members of social networking websites will conclude that you have a lack of respect for them. They’ll either ignore you or ride you out of town on a rail.

So what is “questionable or negative value”? Simple: affiliate links or any other kind of self-promotion. When you join a social networking group and start posting affiliate links, you have just shot yourself in the head. No one will trust you. No one will respect you. Your website will get no traffic. And nobody is going to buy from any of your affiliate links.

OK. So what is “good value”? Simple: valuable information or tools that you give away free of charge. When you join a community and provide “good value”, you are seen as a person who gives good value. So you are respected. If you’re new at this, then your first task is to do a lot of Googling to find valuable information and tools that you can give away free to others in your community. Compile a large list … it’ll come in handy.

The best thing you can do is to actually ask people in the community what they really need. Or listen when they talk to others about it. Then figure out a way to give them what they want. You will gain their trust and respect, which is way more valuable long-term than any affiliate commission you might miss out on today.

Your heart must be pure. Your intention must be to help, to provide value (that word again!). People will trust you when they see that you are genuine, honest, & transparent. But they start out suspicious, because they’ve been burned before. If they think your intention is to do whatever you have to do in order to trick them into buying your stuff, they will know. And they won’t like it. They will beat on you, and they’ll tell anyone who’ll listen what a jerk you are.

On the other hand … if you care, if you bring value to your Facebook community, if you help people, then they will trust you. And they will follow you. You can build long-term relationships with people who will be happy to see you succeed … and may often help … because they like you and they trust you.

Social networking is not advertising. On these social websites, trust is supreme. Blatant advertising kills trust. Providing true value creates trust. And once you have made the connection that creates trust, it’s a natural move for them to go to your website, because they like you and want to know more about you.

That is how to play the social networking game.

Features of YouTube Insight - a free new social marketing tool from YouTube - gives YouTubers detailed stats about the videos they upload:

• How often their videos are viewed by geographic area
• A popularity comparison to all videos in that market in a certain timeframe
• How long it takes for a video to become popular
• what happens to video views as popularity peaks

How does this help you? Use these stats to:

• increase your videos’ view counts
• improve your popularity on YouTube

What if you discover that:

• Your videos are most popular on Wednesdays?
• You have a huge following in Spain?
• New videos that play off previous content become more popular more quickly?

These stats help you make better marketing decisions, such as:

• Tailor your content more to your target audiences
• Post these videos on days you know these viewers are on the site.
• Post your next video in Spanish?

A plan to increase your videos’ popularity is important for all the obvious reasons … including generating more revenue through on-site advertising. More new YouTube features coming soon:

• A specific breakdown of how viewers discovered the video
• Additional statistical information

To see your stats, go to:
YouTube > My account > Videos, Favorites, Playlists > Manage my Videos

Click under the “About this Video” button.

You often hear that each social bookmarking site is different, and it’s best to focus your content on the social bookmarking platform that values that type of content most. Good plan. But how do the different sites value content?

SocialMediaTrader did an analysis of 500 front-page articles from February, 2008, for several different popular social bookmarking sites. The sample size isn’t huge, but results could give you a guideline of the best sites to bookmark your content.

February, 2008 # of Front-Page Stories

StumbleUpon

1. Technology 105
2. Offbeat 93
3. Arts 73
4. Politics  47
5. Lifestyle 48
6. Science 25
7. Videos 24
8. Tutorial 20
9. News 18
10. Business/Make money 17
11. Environment 15

DIGG

1. US Elections 44
2. Tech News  34
3. World News  32
4. General Sciences 30
5. Odd Stuff  28
6. Environment 27
7. Politics  27
8. Comedy 25
9. Movies  24
10. Business 22

Del.icio.us

1. Technology 51%
2. Offbeat 12%
3. Arts 9%
4. Tutorial 7%
5. Business 6%
6. Lifestyle 6%
7. Politics 3%
8. Science 2%
9. Videos 2%
10. Environment 1%

Propeller

1. Politics 68
2. News 63
3. Technology 57
4. Health 48
5. Money 37
6. Humor 25
7. Celebrities 23
8. Do No Evil 21
9. Science 20
10. Personals 14
11. Music 11

MIXX

1. Entertainment 64
2. Politics 59
3. Informative 53
4. Tech 23
5. Business 21
6. Lifestyle 20
7. Other 19
8. Education 13

These stats give you an idea of what each community is looking for, and should give you a start on finding the 1 or 2 sites that give you your best chance of submitting your own niche content that goes viral.

Yahoo announced yesterday a deeper commitment to social networking. Yahoo has joined Google’s OpenSocial initiative, whose purpose is to have developers come up with innovative new applications for the most popular social networking websites.

To make the web more relevant for users, OpenSocial is encouraging apps that not only work on many different social networking sites, but also connect them.

“Yahoo believes in community-driven industry specifications and expects OpenSocial to fuel innovation and make the web more relevant and more enjoyable to millions of users,” said Wade Chambers, vice president of platforms at Yahoo.

MySpace and Orkut are already providing providing OpenSocial applications. Hi5 will begin doing so in a few days. With Yahoo on board, even more users and developers will be participating.

Yahoo, MySpace, and Google are also partnering in a non-profit foundation “to foster the continued open development of OpenSocial,” according to Dan Peterson, Google Product Manager.

The big players in OpenSocial:

• Engage.com
• Friendster
• Google
• hi5
• Hyves
• Imeem
• LinkedIn
• MySpace
• Ning
• Oracle
• orkut
• Plaxo
• Salesforce.com
• Six Apart
• TianjiViadeo
• XING
• Yahoo

Pretty much a “Who’s Who” of social networking … with the exception of Facebook. They seem to be the big holdout.