The new StumbleUpon Logo is a huge step backwards.

Seriously.

Stumbling Around the Web

For those of you who don’t know, StumbleUpon is a fabulous social media sharing site. Their Stumble tool bar is a great way to browse around the web and find new thing online based on your interests.

As you go you can give pages either a thumbs up or a thumbs down. Because it is interest driven people tend to see content they like. Plus they have some sort of learning algorithm so that it tends to show you more stuff that is similar to your likes and less of the stuff you don’t like.

You can also share websites directly with other Stumblers you are connected with, plus a whole bunch of other things.

StumbleUpon has been one of the big traffic sources to my websites over the years.

StumbleUpon Logo Horror

Up until yesterday StumbleUpon had one of the best logos in the whole social media world. I happen to like teal and green. The SU logo flowed from one side of the logo to the other like their service helps you flow through the web.

Here’s what they said about the redesign on their blog:

StumbleUpon Logo Change – We know this is a big change, and many of you (like us) had come to love our old blue and green logo. However, as we spoke with our members during our redesign process, we heard our old logo didn’t capture the true experience you had with StumbleUpon – the excitement you feel with every Stumble and the adventure that we take you on. (And just in case you were wondering, we didn’t change it because some users saw a similarity between our logo and Cascade Complete dishwasher packets, although the likeness is uncanny!) While our old logo will be missed, we have also heard from many of you who really like the new logo and feel that it represents what StumbleUpon is to you. We hope that you will come to love it as much as we do here. Plus it’s going to look GREAT on T-shirts and swag – stay tuned!

So. Let me get this right. The old logo “didn’t capture the true experience” with StumbleUpon. But this new orange eyesore somehow does?

It looks like a clogged pipe! Their marketing folks need some Drano. Talk about a focus group going horribly wrong!

The Old StumbleUpon Profiles

Full Website Redesign

The logo destruction is part of a grand redesign of the StumbleUpon website. I think I get what they are going for.

Seems like they want to make StumbleUpon as much the same as other social sites as they can. They’ve change their “Favorites” to “Likes” because, well, that’s what Facebook does.

New StumbleUpon Profile

At the end of the day I suspect this is a move to try to increase engagement on the website itself. Something tells me most folks use the toolbar nearly to the exclusion of the website.

Honestly I don’t begrudge them any of the changes to the site. I do miss the old ability we had (before their previous website redesign) where we users could customize our profile pages. But hey, the trend in social media sites today is away from personalization of user profiles and towards sterile sameness.

But the logo?!! What ever were they thinking?

Update: In the Mac App Store the iPad/iPhone customer reviews are running about 26 to 3 against the new logo with many folks clamoring to bring back the old logo.

You can find more great articles at SuccessCREEations.

These are just some of the features that can be added to your Facebook fan page with Lujure.

Having a dynamic viral Facebook Fan page is a critical must-have piece of marketing for most any business today.

Most people have figured that they need a Facebook page for their business. However few are building in the features that make them truly magnetic so that they actually attract fans and reach more people. The reason they don’t add these features is because it is really hard for the average person to do. Or at least it used to be anyway.

Let me explain.

Viral Features

What I’m talking about here are especially things like pre-like images and share buttons. Pre-like images are basically just a splash image that is shown to people who haven’t “liked” your fan page yet. When folks click the Like button the main tab content is revealed. Having a good pre-like image taps into people’s curiosity and encourages more likes.

Share buttons allow fans to share your page with their friends on their own Facebook walls. They’re a great way to get viral exposure to your page because they make it easy to share with others.

In fact, take a look at the image to the right there. That’s the Welcome tab for our EmmanuelPress Facebook Page. Here are the the interactive features we’ve got on that page:

1. Share Button – Makes it easy for fans to share the page on their own walls
2. Hot Spots – Link to other important places off of Facebook
3. Embeded YouTube Video – Embed a video welcome for your fans
4. Twitter Stream – Automatically updated from your Twitter profile
5. RSS Stream – List your latest articles automatically
6. Chat Box – Encourage interaction right there on your welcome tab.

And those are just some of the things that can easily be added to your Facebook fan page with this service.

Best Part

Example of a Facebook fan page pre-like image.

But the best part is that these features are now drop-dead easy to add to your Facebook page.

Or, I should say, drag-and-drop easy.

How?

With a service called Lujure I put together our page for EmmanuelPress in just 6 minutes and 2 seconds!

And it was only my second time using their service.

Not only that, but I recorded the whole thing on video, so I was talking while I was doing it (just for the extra distraction.) I wanted you to see how easy it is to put together a fairly complicated Facebook page for someone who was still pretty new to their service.

See for yourself.

Lujure

As you can see in the video, Lujure makes that whole process incredibly easy. I was able to add 6 great interactive features to our Facebook Page without having to do any programming at all. And I did it in as many minutes.

Lujure has several price points including a great Business Plan for people who create and/or manage Facebook pages for other businesses. That’s a great option because you can create as many Facebook Fan Pages as you want with it and it is completely white label (unbranded) so that no one has to know that you are using Lujure. It can be your own secret weapon to speed up production so you can create way more pages in the same amount of time.

They even have a free option so you can create a single tab and “try before you buy” so you can be sure it is all I’m saying it is without any risk at all.

Either way, Lujure will make your life so much easier when it comes you creating a Facebook page that sets your business apart from the competition. Go take a look for your self.

I think you’ll be glad you did.

You can find more great articles at SuccessCREEations.

Today I wanted to share with you an informative infographic put together by DigitalSurgeons.com comparing demographic data between Facebook and Twitter. I found some surprises here.

For example, even though Facebook is just about 5 times the size of Twitter, the first surprise for me is how similar their demographics really are. There are differences, but they are more a matter of degrees than outright contrasts.

It surprises me that Twitter skews a little older than Facebook. If your target market is over 30 years old then there is a higher percentage of them to reach on Twitter.

The income distribution was a little flatter on Twitter than on Facebook. Facebook users are more concentrated more in the middle of the income spectrum whereas Twitter has more at either end.

So what numbers in this infographic jump out at you?

You can find more great articles at SuccessCREEations.

Last week news leaked out of Yahoo’s corporate office via Twitter that the struggling web company was planning to “sunset” several of their services including the social bookmarking site Delicious. The news that Yahoo was planning to shut Delicious down was quickly picked up by tech bloggers. And that prompted a rapid-fire response blog post on Delicious.com denying Yahoo’s intention to shut the service down.

You see they are planning to sell the service, not shut it down.

I’m skeptical on that score. That’s probably because I once rode a company into oblivion all the while buying into everything corporate said about how we were going to be sold. Having been down that road, that blog post seems like a ploy to protect Yahoo’s stock value to me, especially when people in the know seem to think a sale is very unlikely.

It seems Yahoo just laid off most of the Delicious team. And then there’s the pesky detail of a ton of proprietary software deeply intertwined in the Delicious underlying code.

Del.icio.us History

Delicious is a social bookmarking site. It was one of the early ones out there and is fairly popular with the geekier crowd.

For those of us who like to be able to find interesting things sometime down the road, being able to bookmark stuff online is a great idea. Before I started blogging in 2005 I really didn’t have much of a need for web based bookmarking. My browser could handle it all.

But once I started spending more time online it didn’t take long before my browser’s bookmarks folder became unwieldy. Enter Delicious. Or, as it was known at the time Del.icio.us.

It had a funny domain which in a weird way made it easier to remember.

2005 was also about the time that the service was sold to Yahoo for an undisclosed amount. Most estimates I’ve seen were in the $30 million range. Last year the site’s founder said he regretted the sale to Yahoo.

Basically it was a good solid simple to use service that Yahoo purchased and then pretty much neglected to the point where they are looking to unload it one way or another. Of course along the way they changed the domain to delicious.com for good measure.

Why Should You Care?

It sounds like just a sad web 2.0 story. Why should you care?

Here’s the thing. For those of us who have come to rely on Delicious to keep track of our bookmarks it’s an inconvenience to now have to find a substitute service. Not that there aren’t plenty of them to choose from these days. I could list more than a dozen alternatives out there right now.

So, OK. It’s a minor inconvenience.

But what if…

What if, instead of Delicious, it was a service that my business depended on?

For example, I regularly see businesses which the only meaningful web presence they have is on Facebook.

Relying on a third party like that is risky (at the very least!) Sure Facebook is a behemoth and they are unlikely to go anywhere any time soon. Probably. But they are notorious for changing their policies in an almost whimsical fashion.

And they’ve gone from a niche college networking site to the second biggest website in the world in just a few years. What’s to say they might not fall off just as fast?

Stranger things have happened.

Do you really want your organization’s web presence to stand or fall on the whim of another company that you have no control over whatsoever?

I didn’t think so.

The Delicious Lesson

The lesson from this whole Delicious affair is this. When it comes to your own organization, whether it’s a business or non-profit, it is critical that you maintain a strong home base of operations in website that you own (i.e. on your own domain) so that you are not completely at the mercy of some other company’s decision making process.

If a periphery service (such as Delicious in this case) changes or ceases to exist you can adapt.

But if you’re foolishly relying on a social media site to be your main web presence, don’t be surprised to one day they change the rules on you. And that will be much more painful to cope with.

Oh, and I think I’ll be moving my bookmarks over to Diigo for now. What bookmarking service do you like best?

You can find more great articles at SuccessCREEations.

An intern in Facebook’s data engineering department has created a striking image of our connected world by mapping lines visualizing facebook connections between cities in the world.

Paul Butler plotted out lines of Facebook connections using the Latitude and Longitude of the cities for each end of the lines. The result is a pretty striking partial map of the world with the most “connected” portions showing lighter and the less connected parts of the world are darker.

The result is an interesting representation of the world. With over half a billion people using the website it seem to me to be a decent generalization of where the internet connections are in the world.

It’s a good reminder how many people that we can reach for our businesses. The key is to have a dynamic Facebook page to attract people to your business and your main business website. (If you need a more interactive page there is nothing easier to use than Lujure.)

Dark Areas

The light parts of the image are an impressive reminder of how connected our world is becoming.

However the thing that jumped out at me is how much of the world is still so very dark yet. Just take a look at this complete map here. There are huge areas in Africa, South America and Asia that are still pretty dark yet.

My first thought is that there are probably not very many people in those places. And there’s is some truth to that.

So I pulled out an image that I found a while back that shows a composite map of the world ground lights at night. There are some interesting differences in the two maps. Some areas that have power enough for lights at night are still not on Facebook yet, most notably China.

I guess you could say that even the second largest website in the world still has lots of room for growth. Since that’s the case, then there’s surely plenty of room for your website audience to grow too!

You can find more great articles at SuccessCREEations.

There is no denying that social media is a huge phenomenon. At least 16 of the top 20 biggest websites in the world (according to Alexa) have some kind of a social media component. And of course Facebook, the granddaddy of all social media sites, claims over a half a billion users!

Numbers like that get people’s attention. And well they should.

Social media is revolutionizing business communication on a scale not seen since Gutenberg invented his movable type press back in the 1400′s. Businesses need to be tapping into it using sound strategies and tools to simplify and streamline things like building Facebook pages.

Even so there is one huge mistake that I see businesses make time and time again regarding social media. They neglect the most powerful piece of their media strategy.

Building an Audience

The true power of social media is in building an audience. As your audience grows you have a larger pool of people to market your goods and services to.

Business get enamored with the millions upon millions of people that are flocking to social media sites. To often the thinking goes something like, “Here’s a built in audience. All I have to do is get in front of them and I’ll have all the business I can stand.”

It is true that there are tons of folks on social media sites. And it is an excellent idea to get your business in front of as many people there as you can.

The trouble is audiences on social media sites can be a bit fickle. Raw numbers of followers, fans or people who “Like” your Facebook page are usually not a great way to measure your success with social media. (The one thing those numbers are good for is stroking the ego of the person managing those accounts for you.)

While harder to quantify, user engagement is a much more significant measure of success with social media. Because here’s the thing. Simply being in front of people does not turn them into your audience.

Just look at how the word audience is defined.

Audience

1. the group of spectators at a public event; listeners or viewers collectively, as in attendance at a theater or concert: The audience was respectful of the speaker’s opinion.
2. the persons reached by a book, radio or television broadcast, etc.; public: Some works of music have a wide and varied audience.
3. a regular public that manifests interest, support, enthusiasm, or the like; a following: Every art form has its audience.
4. opportunity to be heard; chance to speak to or before a person or group; a hearing.
5. a formal interview with a sovereign, high officer of government, or other high-ranking person: an audience with the pope.
6. the act of hearing, or attending to, words or sounds.

Notice that in order to call a group your audience they need to be “hearing or attending to words or sounds.”

So much of what businesses do on social media today is simply noise that no one is listening to.

Web Publishing

That’s why I see web publishing as the single most critical piece of any social media presence. More specifically I’m talking about content (i.e. articles, videos, photos, etc.) that is published on your own website, on your own domain, on a web hosting account that you pay for and control.

Don’t get me wrong. Social media is a fantastic tool to make initial contact with people you might never reach any other way and connect them to your business. Social media can be the widest part of your marketing fulling that brings potential customers into your business. But there has to be something that you are connecting them to which is more compelling than a “me too” Facebook page.

That something should be your main website.

With the powerful web publishing tools out there today like WordPress, there is no reason any organization can’t build a powerfully engaging web presence at their main website that keeps people coming back over and over again.

Besides, if your primary web marketing presence is a Facebook page then you are putting your organization’s online activity at the mercy of a monolithic company that is notorious for changing their rules on a whim, with no notice and no recourse. That’s a risky approach, to say the least!

Website First, Social Media After

Your first priority should be to build up your own website so that it becomes a strong healthy hive of activity on the web that’s centered around your organization.

Once you have your website in place and starting to build an actual audience, you know the “attending to your words” kind, then when you start engaging social media sites like Facebook and Twitter you will see much more success. People will see that you have something worthwhile to say and will pay much closer attention.

Not only that, but this approach will completely set your organization apart from the overwhelming majority of your competitors. But nearly all of them are still making the huge mistake of ignoring the power of web publishing. They go straight for big social media numbers with no plan to engage those passers-by and funnel them ever closer to paying customers.

Be forewarned. This approach is one that starts off more slowly. In the end, though, it is far more effective and worth it.

You can find more great articles at SuccessCREEations.

Update: Check out the latest full demonstration video where I create a dynamic viral fan page in 6 minutes and 2 seconds: How to Make a Magnetic Facebook Fan Page in Under 10 Minutes with Lujure

I watched a webinar this weekend that blew me away. Nathan Latka hosted the webinar to demonstrate the new service he is launching called Lujure. It is the most powerful Facebook page creation tool I have ever seen. Period.

If you own or run a small business you are going to want to take a look at this service.

The Problem

The challenge with Facebook is that it is so monstrously huge that it is difficult to stand out from the crowd and attract an audience. Unless you can afford to hire both a top notch designer and a programmer that specializes in working with Facebook, odds are you page looks pretty much like every other business Facebook page.

Boring.

And boring is the worst possible thing you can be when you are trying to attract an audience. Boring is the kiss of death in this day of hyper short online attention spans.

But unless you have the budget of a major corporation to hire Facebook programming experts your page then up to now you’ve been on your own to learn the specialized coding language that Facebook uses. And that doesn’t take into account how often Facebook changes things. For example they are moving away from FBML apps to iframes instead.

If you don’t know what those terms mean then Lujure is for you.

The Solution

Lujure is an elegant easy to use solution to building highly interactive Facebook pages without messing with any coding. They’ve built a drag-and-drop interface to design your pages by adding your own custom graphics and custom widgets.

Some of the things you can add to your Facebook pages via drag-and-drop include:

• Share Buttons
• Clickable Images
• Custom Sizable YouTube Videos
• Email Newsletter Sign-up Forms
• Twitter Streams
• Comment Streams
• Flash Video Embeds
• “Invite Your Friends” Widgets
• Live Webcasts
• Live Chat

And you can set up all of these on your Facebook page in just minutes, without any coding. Here is a 4 minute demo video where Nathan creates an entire tab with several of these features from scratch and publishes it.

Watch it and be amazed.

Who is Lujure For?

If you want to take your Facebook page to the next level, but don’t have the programming skills or the time then Lujure is for you. Or if you manage build Facebook pages for clients then Lujure will dramatically reduce your page development time.

I’m not the type of guy to hype things or claim something is the best thing since sliced bread. But Lujure is the real deal.

To see for yourself just click here.

You can find more great articles at SuccessCREEations.

Did you realize that social media happens to be perfectly structured to tie into the way the human brain works by feeding our desire to acquire more information? It does.

And it all has to do with a chemical in the brain called dopamine. Not only that, but it can lead to click addiction.

Your Brain on Social Media

I was always under the impression that dopamine production in the brain was related to the feeling of pleasure. However it turns out that, according to recent research, dopamine makes you addicted to seeking information.

You really should click through and read that very enlightening article.

Seriously. Go read it. We’ll wait here.

OK. Have you read it? Good.

Now let’s move on.

Because that whole thing makes sense too when you look at what Wikipedia has to say about Dopamine, learning, and reward-seeking behavior:

Dopamine is closely associated with reward-seeking behaviors, such as approach, consumption, and addiction. Recent researches suggest that the firing of dopaminergic neurons is a motivational substance as a consequence of reward-anticipation. This hypothesis is based on the evidence that, when a reward is greater than expected, the firing of certain dopaminergic neurons increases, which consequently increases desire or motivation towards the reward.

Did you get all that? Me neither.

But after you boil off all the blah, blah, blah academic-speak here’s what I think it all means.

Because social media comes at us unexpectedly in short bursts of information, it is ideally suited to stimulate dopamine production in our brains. And the dopamine makes us want even more information creating a feedback loop that can lead to click addiction.

That’s probably why some of us can get so distracted when we go into Facebook to check on something and end up spending waaaayyy too much unproductive time in there. It also partly explains why social media has become the incredibly powerful force on the internet that it is.

Not only that, but it also makes it likely that social media will be with us for a long, long time to come.

Business Implications

What does all this biochemistry research mean to us as business owners? It means there is yet another reason why we need to be actively engaged in social media in a sound, systematic way to support our businesses.

I don’t know about you, but I want my business to be on the receiving end of that dopamine induced loop. Fortunately in my case it already is.

We’re seeing the benefits of that social media induced dopamine click addicting feedback loop because I have long practiced the principles and strategies I teach in my New Media Profit Path video courses. I know my strategies work because I’ve got years of personal experience and direct client experience using them.

And now we have some scientific research that explains why the things we do work. Go figure.

It’s amazing what happens when we market our businesses in harmony with the way the human brain is wired. Good stuff!

You can find more great articles at SuccessCREEations.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed but last night I saw that Zombies are taking over Sears.

Sears has also created a new ZombieShopper YouTube channel. The first video was uploaded last week. This morning they uploaded the third video.

They’ve got over 100,000 total channel views as of this writing. That’s not bad, depending on how much they’ve done to promote their channel.

Social Media Marketing

It looks like this is part of a coordinated social media campaign by Sears ahead of the Halloween holiday because Sears also has a ZombieShopper Twitter account that became active about a month ago.

They seem to be putting less emphasis on the Twitter channel as there are only about 600 followers thus far.

Target Market

While it is a novelty, especially around Halloween, I wonder how effective this campaign will be for Sears over the long term. Will this campaign resonate with younger customers and breath new life into the Sears brand?

While I applaud Sears for engaging social media in a potentially risky way, only time will tell whether this new social media marketing campaign will be effective for them long term or not.

Quite frankly, with Halloween only days away I’m surprised a large company like Sears is not putting more effort and resources behind this campaign so they can have a much greater chance of getting it to critical mass and increase the odds that it will go viral before then.

What do you think? Will this campaign be a success or an example of a social media marketing campaign failure?

You can find more great articles at SuccessCREEations.

How about something a little lighter today?

You know something’s successful when folks start making parodies of your work. And the recent Old Spice social media marketing campaign was very successful.

So successful in fact that Sesame Street put together a parody of one of the main Old Spice commercials used in the campaign. Check it out.

Grover as Old Spice Man

That’s something to keep in mind if you are looking for a good idea.

Sometimes reworking something that was wildly successful in your own unique style can be very successful too. Grover’s video has already become the 4th most viewed video on the Sesame Street YouTube Channel in just about a week with nearly 5 million views.

Why It Works

I think the big reason the Sesame Street parody works is because they took a proven concept – the original Old Spice commercial has been watched nearly 22 million times – and presented it in the flavor of a know character – Grover.

Most folks in the US under 50 know who Grover is. I remember seeing him teaching about things like “near and far” 35+ years ago when I was a kid.

While they obviously copied the original, they added Grover’s personality to it, making it uniquely their own.

I actually laughed out loud at the end when he said, “I’m on a horse… [moo] cow.”

And if you haven’t seen it yet, here is the original Old Spice commercial. It’s entertaining in its own right.

The Original Ad

Enjoy!

You can find more great articles at SuccessCREEations.