Stumbleupon is a perfect marketing machine. It brings you interested people. All you need is a relevant, possibly sexy, message (see my next post for an insight about this subject).
People are happy: they get what they are looking for. You are happy: you hit your target. Stumbleupon is happy: more people, more contents.
Ok, you probably think it’s harder than it sounds: just a bit. Let’s see how it works.
You probably already know what Stumble is. If you don’t you can find out here. What interests us here though, is related to marketing. And what Stumble does in terms of marketing strategy is simple yet useful: it gathers a segmented audience. And it happens to be an interested one: they’re there waiting for the next page to load, ready to pay their whole attention to it.
That’s a giant leap from banners, popups and intrusive advertising, isn’t it?
Now, let’s see how Stumble segments its audience. When you sign up Stumble asks about your interests, letting you flag some keywords or asking you to add more (keyword=tag). Then, once you start stumbling, it feeds your browser with sites related to your interests. At this point you’ll be able to thumb up or down these pages. This gives new information to the system which now knows more about your interests and can cross these data with other profiles in order to forsee what other sites might be interesting to you. Stumble lets you also manage your community of friends. This is a further step in profiling users. Stumble takes advantage of this crossing your friends’ tastes with yours. This lets it select the sites to show you also from the thumb up list of your friends.
Here comes the real marketing 2.0: no annoying users at the wrong time or with the wrong message. No interruption. No inattention.
“This is still advertising and it’s bothering me!” you might argue. There are at least two reasons why this is not true.
The first reason is that Stumble let’s you jump to the next site as quickly as clicking on the button “Stumble”. It also lets you thumb down a page letting you get rid of it forever. No bothering: just half a second of your precious time.
The second is better explained by an example: it comes from Facebook but it perfectly delivers the concept of “relevance”. In my Facebook profile I have inserted Elvis Costello as one of my favorite artists. The other day, as I logged into my music application, it showed an alert about Elvis Costello tour dates. Does anyone think I felt annoyed?
Now all you have to worry about is making up an appealing message and inserting it in the Stumble circuit (you might use some friends stumbling your site, I’m sure Stumble won’t mind).

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