The top 3 would depend on you. THere are social bookmarking sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Spinn etc. and there are social networks like Facebook, MySpace etc.

They’re all good to be involved in. My suggestion is to join all you can find and at least start establishing your profile. You don’t have to actively participate in all of them right away, but you can at least establish a presence in each for later.

I hope you get your account back!

So I think we shouldnt annoy them, so that they dont mis understand our efforts as spam , but take it in the right sense.

It’s about striking a balance somewhere in between. May be we are too much focussed on numbers rather than the quality sometimes. Rohit BHargava would be interested to read this.

I recently wrote an article on how to be a top stumbler in less than a week. And it got many thumbs ups but one of the top stumblers turned back to it. And tagged it as spam and focussed on numbers article.

While she was a “looking for fun” stumbler, it was clear that she didnt know anything about marketing.

Well I was not ready to let go and I literally “taught” her what we SEO guys were doing and how we respect the system.

We finally agreed upon certain things and she actually did a thumbs up. Phew!

While I personally don’t care for blogs that tell people how to use SU to effectively market their own non-SU sites, at least if a blog is going to do that, I’m glad to see a blog that instructs these people how to do it *ethically* as you stated in your post, as well as hopefully to employ some manners and common sense in the process.

Anything you can tell these marketers that will help them to better understand how to use the system (such as properly labeling their reviews, etc.) without angering the masses at SU is a GOOD thing.

So I am not against your blog or your niche at SU at all. I’m against the *abusers* of SU, and I don’t believe either you or your blog belong in that category. Unfortunately, there are far fewer “ethical” marketers on SU than the sleazy ones. Let’s hope your advice can help change some of that.

Anyway, I just wanted to make myself clear regarding this particular site and your site on SU. Thanks.

Cheers,
caile~

Thanks for the very in-depth comment.

I fully agree with you!!

My whole point is that we need to be submitting stories to an appropriate category, which would be marketing.

On the other hand, if someone stumbles one of my pages and places it in an inappropriate category, does that make me a spammer? Hell no!!!

The problem lies in the stumblers perception that anything that lands in “their” category that is marketing related is spam.

They obviously don’t understand how SU works.

Do I look at SU as a means of marketing? Yes. That’s because there are many Stumblers who ARE interested in reading my musings!

It all comes down to the category in which the person stumbling places any particular page.

I did notice the “hide review” link finally and I’ve hidden a couple children who felt it appropriate to call me a spamming idiot for running a marketing related blog.

To be honest, I’m very tired of marketers that have seemed to have exploded onto SU in huge quantities just in the past 8 or so months.

I am tired of people who don’t even subscribe to my pages constantly asking me to “review” and “thumb up” their websites because I happen to have a large fan base. I flag these people as “spam” and don’t even bother to visit, because it’s rude.

I joined SU for fun, like the overwhelming majority of stumblers there. The wave of marketing-oriented stumblers is ruining the landscape. If we could keep all the marketers “confined” to a certain section (like a smoking section in a building), then those that WANT to stumble these sites/pages/people can GO there and visit, not have all the SEO crap foisted on them when we’re at SU to enjoy ourselves.

And to be honest, we don’t really give a hoot if your site makes money. We’re on SU for ourselves and don’t care for marketers flooding the place and mis-labeling their blogs to inflate “traffic numbers” and we’re forced to wade through more and more pages of this “how to manipulate SU for your personal gain and screw the rest of the 3 million people there who might not appreciate it” type stuff.

Yes this is rather strongly written (I’m exercising restraint actually because I have gotten to the point I’m nearly ready to leave SU because it’s not “fun” anymore, it’s all about business and marketing — and I have a marketing DEGREE!). But the fact is, MOST of us (and especially the old-timers) do NOT like this influx on how to use SU for your personal gain. It’s supposed to be a collaborative effort to share with other stumblers content we’re personally interested in. And frankly, all these “how to make money off your blog” blogs are NOT interesting to those of us who simply want to read some news or photoblog or find humor or whatever we’re there for.

As an aside, it is possible to hide negative reviews: Just go to your “reviews” page and find any negs and on the right side it says “hide review? yes/no” and you click yes. However, if you DO choose to hide the review, it also means you can no longer see the person if they visit your page’s network rotation, nor will they be able to contact you (you are essentially putting them on ignore). So hiding reviews should be done with caution.

As I keep saying in my posts about these marketing blogs that are yammering about how to do this and that on SU, I do not intend my commentary to be directed at any one person or site, but at the overall practice. There is no subtlety and there is only going to be the eventual alienation of the true stumblers, so that although at first you will get a lot of “curious” traffic, I suspect that before long, the only real traffic these blogs will get is from other marketers looking for the same content and have the same goals with using SU, as the “regular” stumblers will have basically gotten too annoyed to bother.

These are simply my opinions. I will state for the record that since I am good friends with a LARGE number of the more long-time stumblers, these opinions are quite widely held, and I think they should be allowed to be heard. Thanks.

Sincerely,
caile~