I thought I had posted this case study from the NTC 08 Panel called "Social Media Case Study Slam" already, but looks like I didn't. This case study is by Danielle Brigida from the NWF and her experience using Digg and StumbleUpon for generating traffic. Some great insights. The rest of the case studies are here.
Slide 1: My name is Danielle Brigida and I work on the Operations team for National Wildlife Federation. Today I'll be talking about using Digg and Stumbleupon specifically.
Slide 2: The National Wildlife Federation is one of the largest conservation organizations in the U.S. It's part of my job to investigate the best tools for engaging potential activists and members.
Slide 3: That being said, our average member is a 65 year old woman. We are such a big tent organization that covers so many issues that we are looking for ways of broadening our audience.
Slide 4: After attending last year's NTEN, two tools stuck out for me that I really wanted to try- Digg and Stumbleupon. I had already been working for NWF on facebook and myspace but I wanted to test out more social bookmarking and networking sites.
Slide 5: I decided on these two sites because they increased page views "traffic". I was hoping that I could offer the first handshake to a new audience. I'm interested in driving traffic because I see an importance in bringing people back to NWF's site and engaging them there, instead of in another location.
Slide 6:So the first thing I tested out was Digg. Basically you submit a timely Url, summarize your content and post it under a category. It is then voted up or down. Your goal is to get your dig to "go popular", which means it gets on the highly-visible Digg homepage.
Slide 7: This is an example of an NWF submission on the digg homepage. It was quality content that interested a number of readers. Getting it on the digg homepage was the difference between getting 30 and 30,000 pageviews. .
Slide 8: The digg going popular led to this page getting 48,500 views the month of February. The green represents the views directly coming from dig. But what you see is that the inbound links boosted the number up from the previous month.
Slide 9: Another way I chose to experiment with this network was using our blog, Wildlife Promise. It doesn't have the readership of our website, but it served as a great playground for testing theories of what information goes popular on digg.
Slide 10:By testing what content was well-received, I was able to hit the sweet spot of digg more often. One of the blog postings I did talked about animal tactics for surviving the cold. It went popular and drove 29,000 views to our blog in one day. You can see the bump in the graph…our blog wasn't used to this.
Slide 11: This chart further explains digg's impact. When something goes popular on digg it is picked up in a number of dig rss feeds that feed into blogs. Some bloggers will also repost dig stories as well.
Slide 12: I know I was just making it sound easy, but dig takes time. You have to build up your relationships like anything else and that's where the investment comes in. This is a chart of how many digs I got when I started in November. It steadily increased but took about an hour a day for months.
Slide 13: .I don't have a lot of time but I wanted to talk about our runner up in traffic drivers. Stumble upon is effective because it's target marketing. You discover websites and tag them to interests, and it learns what you like and brings you more.
Slide 14: Stumbleupon allows people to thumb up your site and write comments, therefore your ROI can come in forms of thumbs and comments. The more thumbs, the greater the traffic the site receives.
Slide 15: Stumble doesn't push the numbers, but it pushes the quality. Stumbleupon visitors bring people who stay on the site longer, and only had a 33% bounce rate. They visit nearly two pages of your site on average as well. Not to mention: 51% of visitors have a household income over 60k.
Slide 16: In order to invest in Stumbleupon I made a decision to really focus on quality content and sometimes that took time to find. I also made really great friendships and built relationships.
In many of these networks it's about reciprocation, and not about looking for people to do your work for you.
Slide 17: My greatest challenge with social media was finding the time. It takes around an hour a day for a while to develop relationships and build a positive reputation. But it’s not just a daily investment; it happens over time as well. Look at it as patient money*
Slide 18: Overall sites like Digg and Stumble are great for increasing your site visibility with little money. Instead of spending thousands of dollars on google ads, use these sites as a chance to push things out quickly. With a well built profile you can do a serious amount of marketing for very cheap.
Slide 19: Stumble and digg are top referrers to nwf.org and have driven 100,000 page views in the past few months. They have also brought in 95% new visits.
Slide 20: Here are the takeaways when experimenting with social media. Learn the networks (and take what you know about your organization to help you decide what will work)
Invest and reciprocate. Don't expect anything from people. Listen to feedback. Consider your niche. Never get complacent because new stuff is always coming out. And know that social media isn't the answer but it's part of the solution.
