Calendar
Network
Feeds
- 52
- Sphinn It!
Went Hot: February 11, 2008 - 3:58 pm
Posted By: jennosborne 201 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://www.e3internet.com)
Category: Other Social Media
It's building links and bookmarks and it's driving 100's of SU reviews. Is it a great marketing ploy or Spam?
What do you think?
7 Comments
Comments
Thanks for the Sphinn Jenn. It's been really interesting following this one over the weekend; the meme has been red hot. I wrote the article as news, having come across one of these cards myself but if people are interested we've had around 4500 uniques in last 24hrs.
Not sure if more cards are going to appear - or how the SU community will take to them if they do. Some people seem to be enjoying the 'game', others are fairly annoyed with what they see as spam.
As a marketing ploy though it's original and has succeeded in building up a lot of links and reviews for the cards on SU, as well as other bookmarking sites (del.icio.us especially - Joker has been saved by 120+). Again, I'm not sure new cards will have this much success.
It's unclear what the inventor is marketing, his site or the idea itself? It's certainly raised the bar for the next person to try.
It's amazing how a crowd draws others to find out what it's all about, even if one is only left with a question.
I really liked the first cards to appear. The idea was new and the design work was high quality. The author of these ones seems to be bringing this to a close, with a card called 'Finale' (http://www.upnatom.org/lst_stc25.htm).
However the copycats seem to have missed the point as to why the first ones were cool. First, they aren't adding anything origional to the meme. Secondly, they aren't coming up the quality level on the graphics. For both these reasons, the new cards are starting to look a lot like spam.
I saw one of these cards. I figured it was some ploy to generate interest. Since there was no immediate value to me, I moved on. However, I will concede that the card I saw captured my attention enough that I had to think about what might be going on.
Ditto to MariosAlexandrou. I stumbled into two of them and paused enough to think...what is going on here? Didn't thumb down or up but moved on because there wasn't any value to me either.
This move seems awfully gimmicky to me. As with Marios and Jameszol I can't see how it adds any value to the Stumbling experience. Is anyone in Sphinn likely to collect the cards... I highly doubt it!
I've written a follow-up post to this, trying to explain why I found this so interesting and what lessons could be learnt for future StumbleUpon virals.
http://www.e3internet.com/greenhouse/nick/12/02/2008/blueprint-for-a-stumbleupon-viral/