Using Send To as a information centre
Most of you will be familiar with the Stumbleupon toolbar and in particular with the send to button we have discussed its uses before and when I first reviewed it considered it a fantastic tool to start a stumble however since then the “send to” has become devalued.
“the “send to” has become devalued“
The devalueing of the “Send to” command creates some interesting new uses not as a means to send interesting articles to one another as this would now make it pointless if you valued the article then you would not want to use the “send to” however we can use the “send to” to notify fellow social media junkies of something that may or may not be useful.
In other words
Do not use the “send to” on your posts and article pages
Seriously Don’t do it you are actually harming the posts chances of doing well on Stumbleupon if you use this tool in.
How it works
Presuming you or some one else has submitted an amazing piece of content to a page like Digg, Sphinn etc then a page will be created on that site, by using the “send to” button on the social media page and not the article without thumbing the page up you can send a message asking for a vote, digg, thumbup.
Key points
- When you use the “send to” button without first thumbing or creating a review a stumble begins on the page but that stumble has no initial stumbler and so will result in no traffic unless a massive amounts of other stumblers thumb the page up.
- This really only works on social media sites that create a dedicated page for each item i.e Digg clones.
- It really only works as long as all the people realise you are not looking for a thumbs up but another action a digg or a sphinn.
The downside
Their is a long term negative to this, if you are not a very active stumbler repeatedly using the “send to” button without receiving thumbs up for posts you are sending people to you will slowly see your audience score reduce an active stumbler will see this to but it is masked by the positive thumbs up they are receiving through their normal stumbling. You also are relying on people using the stumble bar every so often to notice that a new site has appeared.
What about Ebay won’t they get upset?
I can’t imagine they will be upset by not thumbing the sites and creating stumbles without an initial stumbler you are preventing your “send to” stumbles to pollute Stumbleupon, moreover this technique relies on people using Stumbleupon and seeing the sponsored posts which is how Stumbleupon is funded so they are not going to be upset.
Is it worth it?
Well I’m not the only person playing with this or similar techniques, Marty from aimClear has been using a similar technique though I hope this variant reduces the chances of polluting Stumbleupon a little less. We are not alone many people including Rob from Yack Yack have effectively been doing what I’m proposing for a while now and like Marty my original inspiration came from Bill and his idea of claiming your Stumbleupon blog in Technorati.
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October 7, 2007 at 12:52 pm
Good post Tim,
An important variable to all of this is simply the high quality of the internal communication systems in each community.
SU is a very efficient method (the best), even outside stumble intent, to stay in touch with my friends. It is actually the ultimate “send to a friend.” It is the most logical way to recommend a page, again, with or without stumble intent.
SU is a kick ass program. Sometimes I get blind product “Send to” messages and wonder if it’s Ebay testing.
October 7, 2007 at 12:56 pm
Also, let’s not forget actually giving the Digg or Sphinn page the thumbs up which certainly does drive traffic. Since you are not bookmarking your own domain, SU thinks it’s just fine. It works rather well to promote individual Sphinn story pages in SU and then send to friend.
October 7, 2007 at 12:59 pm
Totally nice clean and effective tool just remember it saps a bit of your audience score so you have to be a little careful and not go overboard
its ironic that the one thing this technique can’t be used for is sending organic stumbleupon traffic 
October 7, 2007 at 4:48 pm
It makes life that little bit more efficient. You know, the first time I saw the feature and the message appear I hadn’t been to SU for a while and thought, wtf, and promptly ignored the mesage! I’m guessing that messenger may have thought, what an anti-social so and so!
I think a mass send to option could be cool, or perhaps it exists already and i’m simply not seeing it..it’s been a long sunday
October 7, 2007 at 6:22 pm
I like this method of using SU to get votes but there is another downside: speed. Most social sites have a certain time frame (usually 24 hours) so it will only work if the stumbler is active in his or her usage of the toolbar.
I have tried this for Digg and gotten votes 2 days after it was sent. IMessengers and emails are also a lot more efficient, especially since send-to doesn’t allow mass mailing.
I’m less concerned with the audience score depreciation, if there is such a thing. What you leak, you can easily replace by stumbling a news item, picture or video. And if you’re an active stumbler, you’ll do it instinctively without thinking, although you can certainly draw up a plan for that if you are worried about giving and not getting back.
Fear of leaking audience score is similar to the ‘pagerank leak’.. let’s not make stumbling so clinical, shall we?
October 7, 2007 at 9:10 pm
They are certainly not the same, stumbleupon audience has an actual effect on how many users your thumb brings PR is in a irrelevant index to amuse childish webmasters and a tool for Google to try and keep “rogue” and vain webmasters in check. But that said you really shouldn’t worry about leaks if your an active stumbler and given this technique realise on your working within an active goup that could be taken as a given.
October 8, 2007 at 5:06 am
I am obviously aware of the difference between PR and the SU ‘audience score’. I know they are not the same.
I’m talking about perceived possible results. About the fear. The apprehension behind doing a specific action, because you don’t want to ‘give too much’ or lose something from your end.
For example, the fear of linking out too much and ‘leaking’ PR. The fear of using send-tos because as you said.. it ’saps a bit of your ‘audience score’, whatever that is.
It’s a little ridiculous to me. The ’send-to’ feature being seen as a obstacle to getting more traffic. Perhaps that’s the case in your experiments but I frankly have not seen a drop in traffic from using the function.
October 8, 2007 at 7:46 am
Maki I can’t help thinking you were just in a grumpy mood last night
but regardless I’m not trying to cause panic, and certainly would never tell some one not to do something.
I think anyone who has been using sendto button regularly will have realised by now that even though a lot more people have thumbed the story up it hasn’t taken of any where near as quickly as you would expect.
The devalueing of the sendto was a logical step by Ebay all I’m saying is that we use the devalued sendto to our advantage if the sendto still had value you wouldn’t use this technique as it would pollute the stumbleupon results.
October 9, 2007 at 4:05 am
I actually don’t like using the send-to function to send people to voting pages, although I did recommend that myself in a writeup.. cuz like you said, it pollutes the SU results.
It’s still terrific as a networking tool and I wouldn’t say that its completely de-valued. Perhaps you have it all figured out but the algo is a puzzle to me.
For example, if you send the page to someone and someone stumbles it with a review, it’ll show up in the favorites section of everyone who has befriended him or her, therefore, maybe attracting more people who might click through to stumble it as well. Additional visibility is good, don’t you think?
Also.. the speed of the stumbles + reviews will throw your site up on Stumble Buzz. Send it to a couple of folks who leave reviews and it’ll get listed on SU buzz quick, even though the people who stumbled it might not get you much traffic. Again, it gives your URL more visibility in the SU community and ergo more possible stumbles.
Perhaps I’m off somewhere in my thoughts. I hate trying to think about the algo.
October 9, 2007 at 5:04 am
[...] Tim Nash brings another interesting look at StumbleUpon with his post about centralizing your social world. Until recently I had never used the “Send To” feature of StumbleUpon but have used it [...]
November 8, 2007 at 12:48 pm
[...] 46. Centralizing Your Social World [...]
November 8, 2007 at 5:47 pm
[...] 46. Centralizing Your Social World [...]
December 15, 2007 at 11:54 am
[...] Tim Nash UPDATE: Don’t use this feature! - since this article things have changed see Centralising your Social World for more [...]