Don’t ignore del.icio.us and Stumbleupon

Measurement is important
I’m pretty particular about stats, measurement has always been pretty important, in the corporate landscape measurement is needed to help justify success (or failure) even if you already know something is working to executives. After defining ones goals, you should setup a measurement process to benchmark your progress.

Growth in referring traffic from Delicious and Stumbleupon
Lately, I’ve been noticing a crescendo in the referrals from both del.icio.us and Stumbleupon, websites, their currently the 5th and 6th top referrer yet again. Much of the traffic has been coming in my recent Many Forms of Web Marketing for 2008, (Update: which has 578 tags on Delicious, and reinforcing comments) which would didn’t do well on Digg (more entertainment geared) I suspect that Delicious and Stumbleupon are more geared towards web professionals. Delicious is a social bookmarking site, where members can tag content, share it with others, and find similar information. Stumbleupon, provides content based upon behavioral matching; as one specifies likes or dislikes, it also recommends content that other members like you prefer. Both are like social based search, as you can see how people really think about your content and how they self-organize.

Others sources
Although there’s not been much change with the dominant referrers to my blog is direct visitors, then Google search, Google refferals, then Twitter, I’m noticing this increase in traffic from Delicious and Stumbleupon. Unlike Digg, which gives high levels of spike traffic, both Delicious and Stumbleupon are providing consistently growing traffic patterns and are often in my top 6 refferes

A Web Strategist should incorporate these tools
If you’re a web strategist, you should be looking inside of these tools, look up your content (and your competitors content) and see how the content has been tagged, commented on, and what members have said. You can both find influencers in your market, learn about how to create metadata, SEO, SEM keywords, and gather other intelligence. If you’re truly savvy, you should be tagging all your own content in both of those websites. More here: Web Strategy: Using Delicious for Marketing Research.