StumbleUpon as a Marketing Tool

Yesterday after implementing StumbleUpon tools including the Firefox toolbar I decided to do a little test. I picked one of my photo from a trip I had to Cannon Beach in January of this year. The light was great and the Nikon D60 performed admirable for its first time out of the box. I clicked on the "I like it!" button on the StumbleUpon toolbar. The results the next day were remarkable.



One great thing that flickr does is analytics on referring websites. This makes StumbleUpon a unique marketing tool that is measurable and trackable. You can clearly see just how effective StumbleUpon can be below. Similar to YouTube in it concept of channels, a user can tailor their stumbles to their own likes. Similarly your online content that you refer to StumbleUpon will be viewed only be users who have made a conscious decision to see content similar to yours.



The process I am developing is to incorporate this involves creating interesting, compelling assets then throw them out to social networks via facebook, twitter and StumbleUpon and ba-da-bing you have a pseudo-viral marketing campaign.

Stainless Steel Eagle Logo

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Originally uploaded by ewuphoto

Here's a photo I took yesterday on a campus photoshoot. I cropped and color corrected the photo in Lightroom 2. I think the added vignette and intense yet muted highlights compliment it well.

StumbleUpon Buttons

I've recently been turned on to StumbleUpon by a co-worker. It is a website that is truly web surfing at its best. Instead of surfing by keywords or by links on a webpage, you surf by recommendations. Basically it's social networking where someone else does the surfing and you reap the benefits.

There is a toolbar you can download for Firefox that is utterly simple. Just click on the "Stumble!" button then you are off to some of the most interesting sites on the web. There is a log-on and a profile that you can create where you can tailor your stumble to different criteria. Mine include graphic design, photography and guitar. You can also send a stumble to your contacts which I have use quite a lot. Another feature is the "I like it!" button. It works rather like Pandora's thumbs up thumbs down feature and tailors future stumbles to your liking.

I found another tool to integrate StumbleUpon into other applications. I found it as a stumble from StumbleUpon itself. The Buttons & Tools is a another simple code generator that gives you many great options on the size of the button you wish to add to your blog. As you may have noticed I put a StumbleUpon button on the bottom of each of my blog entries. Now an interesting blog entry can be contributed to the global pool of stumbles.

2009 Spring Flowers

Spring flowers have survived the flowers at Eastern Washington University.

Flickr, the Future of Broadcasting?

Flickr can possibly have a actual real-world application?!

Let's say you have a number of large displays situated around you business. On these displays you show photos, events and marketing messages through PowerPoint. Now you can feed these displays through flickr. Shazam! Flickr is now something more than just an easier way to share photos with your friends.

Simply put your favorite photos in a set, click the slide show button, go full-screen and violá you are broadcasting you photos. The beauty about this is that you don't need the PowerPoint application on every computer you just need an internet connection and a browser. Updating is also supremely easy. Just drop an new photo in the set and arrange the order to your liking.

All this would be total awesomeness if only the slide shows would loop. Flicker built the best slide show solution on the web but forgot to put an option to loop. I wrote flickr a flickrmail. I got several responses, one of which I believed was actually from a person. I hope that they really consider this added functionality.

Is Twitter the Be All End All?

The integration of social media is the next leap in computing (human) evolution. I have always said that content means nothing without context. That being said, up until now the concept of creating digital media has been absolute, meaning it is a stand-alone entity. We create a photo to be put on a discrete website, we create bit of copy to be put on a discrete website never to be seen by anyone but the intended user.

Now we can create a photo or bit of copy that can be used and shared by millions with each use being referenced back to the creator. With that, context is king. It not what we have... but how do the things we have relate to other things. It is not enough to have a story, a map, a video, a photo, a graph, a pdf without their reference to other pertinent assets. That's where the rub comes. What is pertinent to the message?

Twitter is a great simple tool, but being simple it lacks serious functionality. Where Twitter shines is its ability to integrate itself into other media. That is the key to being viable in the future. How open is my network? How easy is to share my information with other? Why would anyone ever want to use me?

Pat McManus speaks at JFK

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Originally uploaded by ewuphoto

I shot this yesterday at the Pat McManus reading in the Kennedy Library on the Cheney campus of Eastern Washington University. The turn out was exceptional with approximately 350 people in attendance. The lighting in JFK is horrendous. Mixed lighting with overcast daylight streaming through the windows and a nasty mix of tungsten and fluorescents. I just picked a white balance that would give him the best skin tone. Pat McManus to see the rest of the set. for more photos.