Are you a Social networking enthusiast (like I’m trying to be?) .

I’m very much enjoying the social media boom happening. It all started with Digg, Delicious, and SU. As you might know, I’m a SU enthusiast, and prefer it to others. Because there is less spam on it. Though the traffic it generates is gradual, it’s quality one. There are less marketeres and more genuine guys. While it’s possbile that the kind of traffic from SU is not targeted, because it’s more likely that they come searching for a funny pic or so, whatever happens out of it is legit. You get a thumbs down if you are boring and a thunbs up if you are really good. Nothing in between. And more importantly, it doesn’t crash your servers !

I’ve been using Twitter, Tumbler, SU, Sphinn and quite some new ones recently. Apart from the fact that it’s the "bandwagon effect" that makes me jump into all those, the product quality is what makes me come back to it. Otherwise, I’d register my ID on Twitter and never come back.

One such newbie that impressed me is Mixx. Yep, nice name right? Well, to be honest, it’s a Digg clone (probably guessed it from the name). But, this is a clever clone.

I find Digg cluttered and beaming with spam. So i avoid it however great and popular the product is. I use it on a minimal scale, just to keep the balls rolling, that’s it.

Mixx scores in this area. It’s a clean one (at least now) with some interesting users and a good product. It offers everything as Digg but hey, I have more breathing space here!

Let me give you one golden tip - whatever social media it is, if you are the first to jump in, your chances to get to the top are more.

So if you want o join me in the Social medias, hop in. Here are my profiles.

Twitter - Tumblr - Facebook - Linked In - Stumble Upon - Digg - Mixx

Did I miss any? Quite possible.

Social media profile management itself has come out to be a profession these days right? Someday down the line, I may hire someone to manage my social media profiles (There are numerous companies in the west who does it already).

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I somehow have the feeling that it’s not fair to write something so harsh about SMO, after all, it gave me traffic like no one ever did, all the time, every single time. But after all that hep, hype and hooplah at the end, it all rolls into fancy titles, numbered lists and those endless 101 blah blahs you could do to blah blah! That’s about it. Eat it !

I tried my best but social media optimization simply wouldn’t let itself grow. It limited itself from palatable, numbered lists and crafty articles to bookmarkable low-value posts. There seems to be “see-saw” going on between quality content and traffic.

When you want to make SMO friendly content, the quality factor plummets down, and when you write real good classic articles, the SMO factor is gone for a toss. Well, as always, there has been exceptions to this and there are quite a few who managed to get the best of both worlds, but it didn’t happen all the time for them - meaning they were lucky.

Like my creative juices always pull me I feel SMO is like a Mc Donald quickie while real good content is much beyond it. It is right that people don’t like to read, but skim. They like to share slick things, and dislike thick write ups. True, but in all that hustle to make shareable, candy floss articles there is something that we often ignore - the infoseekers are too out there, who make less noise, but observe you carefully. They may not share your article, but remember it, they may not digg or thumbs up your article, but congratulate you when you see in person.

So ultimately it boils down to one question - SMO, or info seekers? Seems like we have quite a lot to sort out and probably time will prove.

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There are quite a lot of social bookmarking sites and equal number of plugins available these days. Every new blog has a list of social bookmarks by the side. One question that came to mind is , how many of them do you really use?

There is magnolia,blink bits, blink list, buddy marks,citeulike,connotea,del.icio.us,digg it,feed me links, furl, give a link, gravee, igooi, lilisto, linkagogo, linkroll, netvouz, newsvine, reddit, scuttle, rawsugar, shadows, sphinn, simy,tagtooda, talkdigger, wink,diigo, dzone, squidoo, looklater, recommendzit,segnalo,mr.wong, my tuts, flog this, feedmarker, linkroll and boy there are many more getting ready for 2008.

I was thinking of putting the most popular ones link on the blog and was literally confused going through the entire list of available social bookmarking sites available. Many of these sites are very much popular in their own niches, and localities like Mr. Wong which is very popular in China. But the truth is that all the visitors may not find all the social bookmarks interesting. Everyone needs to make a selection out of the whole bunch.

My favorites are Stumble upon, Sphinn and Digg. I normally use these out of the whole array and am pretty sure that they are the popular guys around. Anyway, I’m putting these guys(along with some other guys) link in the articles page so that visitors can easily pick their favorite social bookmarking site.

Also, I;d like to introduce you to a nice site which will help you put the social bookmarking links to your site as well. It throws up a neat looking HTML code, that you can of course tweak around to your own styling preferences. But there are no buttons, this one is for the guys who believe in minimalism. The site is called Social bookmark link creator and it gives you a clean little HTML code based on which social bookmarking site you prefer. Try it out today, hope you’ll enjoy it as much as I did.  

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I think the Social Media Optimization strategies are a bit overdone these days. Honestly, I don’t enjoy the typical “24 steps to make you famous” articles at all. They lack the quality factor in them. Everybody is too focused on numbers and the overall quality of your work is just ripped off for the sake of getting a stumble or that pinch effect on your traffic.

My favorite tool in Social Media is undoubtedly Stumble Upon. I just love the tool and is quite an experience using it.
I started using the tool earlier this year and it’s been a very enjoyable experience overall. I normally stumble blogs and articles along with interesting funny photos etc. The beauty about the tool is that it gives you surprises, all the time!

You get so absorbed with the tool that your number of stumbles automatically goes up and you never keep track of it until one fine day someone alerts you about it. You go on adding friends and one day you reach the 200 friends limit.

When do I use Stumble Upon?

Normally, I use stumbleupon when I want to get surprised! I know that there are lot of information available on the Internet about anything and everything, but where is all this catalogued? A directory? Come on, scrolling through a directory and finding content is the last thing I’d do to get surprised! LOL

Stumble Upon comes in handy at these times. I think it is the most disciplined human edited database of ONLY the most interesting webpages on the internet everyone has access to.

It also comes in handy when I’m running out of ideas. When I’m using it I’m pretty sure that the next stumble that I’d have is going to be better than the one I’m on right now. It takes me to the best pages every single time.

Why do I use Stumble Upon?

I prefer Stumble Upon to any other social bookmarking sites because of it’s quality. I think the SU community is very quick to respond to junk, than in any other social bookmarking site, so finding unworthy information is a rare possibility. The SU community itself is a factor that makes SU a great place to be.

Tips to make your Stumble Upon experience pleasurable

So, have you been using SU recently? If not, I strongly recommend you to go about it right now. You can find my profile here, don’t forget to add me as your friend.

If you have been using SU, I have the following tips to you to making it a pleasurable experience.

- Don’t do it for numbers please
One grave mistake we all tend to do (especially marketers out there) is to use SU for generating traffic alone.
Agreed, that SU is a great place to get traffic but please understand that it’s quality first. If you focus only on numbers, the SU experience is going to be painful for you. Instead, use the tool in it’s true sense. To share and to enjoy the internet.

- Network widely
Stumble Upon is a social networking tool combined with social bookmarking, so the more the networking the more pleasurable the experience! From my experience I understood that being an island on SU is like being a dumbass, it works well only if you network well. So appreciate others talk to them and review their stumbles. It’s fun believe me!

- Don’t self promote
Never ever do this. Well, I don’t think it’s against the TOS, but it definitely does not give a good picture about you to others. It’s other’s job to decide if you are good. You cannot self proclaim it can you? I’ve seen quite some webmasters do this for the sake of getting popularity, and sometimes if it’s a real good article the SU community will forgive you, but it’s really stupid for someone to ONLY submit his content. This normally happens wit marketers who use SU for only marketing purposes. You can easily make out these guys from their profile. They’d probably have 5 stumbles out of which 4 will be theirs and they’d only have joined a few months back, plus no reviews, no fans what so ever.

- Promote quality, avoid junk
Being a SU user, it’s your duty to promote quality by “thumbing up” a good article and it’s equally important to thumbs down a bad article. Because you don’t want your friends to see terrible webpages, but interesting ones. SO use the tool sensibly, thumbs down what you don’t like. There’s nothing wrong in it, it’s for the good of the community.

- Share and review
The most interesting factor about SU is that it helps you to share and review right within the tool. It may be available on other tools too, but I don’t think people get involved with it as on SU. So do share your thoughts on the stumbles, say your mind in the profile page about a stumbler or his stumbles, review people, it all helps in the betterment of the community.

- Stumble daily, make it a routine
Beginners would find it bizzare. But at least a month old stumbler would agree wit me on this that the more the stumbles the better the experience. So stumble daily and uniformly, make it a routine. It helps you in the long run. 

- Enjoy the small things in life like funny pictures
SU is a great place to find funny pictures on the internet. I mean, we all get those email forwards that we never really check, but imaging when you have an entire list of those pictures and you find it yourself? Interesting isn’t it? SU helps you to enjoy the small things like this, a picture, a video that will make your day.

- Stumble through your friends
This is a personal favorite of mine. I have a group of friends who are probably the best I found on SU. And there’s an option on SU to stumble only through your friends stumble. It’s highly possible that whatever they have stumbled would be of interest to me. So rather than doing a general stumble, do a stumble through your friends (or anyone of them) and it helps you to share things.

- Explore all categories and types
There are some interesting categories on SU like videos,pics,blogs etc that will help you to stumble pages by category. Rather than doing a general stumble, do stumbles in categories for example, stumble pics only. This will enrich your SU overall experience.

What you should not do at SU

- Never self promote
- Never spam
- Use pseudo ID’s

That’s about it. Have a great Stumble Upon experience !

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