I just noticed a very curious thing in my web stats for this month, that gives rise to a number of even more curious ponderings…
First, here’s the “curious thing”…
Actually, allow me to preface this fact with the information that I am not a social network marketer – I dabble with the social networks, I know a little, and I’m constantly experimenting to try and discover more about them and their role in the future of web marketing.
Furthermore, I DO consider myself knowledgeable with SEO. Search engines are my thing, and I pride myself on that knowledge.
That said, the curious thing, is that in my web stats this month I noticed that I received more traffic from [tag]Stumbleupon[/tag] than I did from Google.
Now this could mean a number of things, so allow me to entertain a few thoughts about this statistic publicly…
First, the extent of my Stumbleupon promotion for this site has been as follows:
1. I use the stumbleupon plugin so that the icon comes up under my posts…
2. About two, maybe three months ago, I tried stumbleupon advertising and sent through maybe 2000 visitors to my site.
That’s it.
For the purpose of an even analysis, I do very little SEO for this site other than matching my meta tags and keywords to the post title, trying to publish a lot of quality content (which one way or another does seem to get found in the SEs) and I get a link every now and then from another blogger in the blogosphere.
Now, let’s assume that rather than being meaningless, this statistic has some metaphorical significance – and let’s continue to explore…
DOES THIS MEAN… that there will come a time in the future where more people will find your site through the social networks than through the search engines?
I know alot of people who think so.
DOES THIS MEAN… that there will come a time in the future where how much traffic your site gets is influenced more by how well it meets a READERS quality algorithm, rather than a ROBOTS quality algorithm…?
I know alot of people who think so.
DOES THIS MEAN… that to evolve with the times, the search engine algorithms too will fall more into line with the notion of quality as defined by real human opinion?
Again, I know alot of people who would think so.
Personally, I don’t know the answer but I tell you what, these are some pretty frickin important questions to answer for online marketers moving into the future.
There’s more to this discussion, but I thought I’d let the that initial seed marinate momentarily before we continue.
P.S. I’m even making this the first post in my blog’s new Web 2.0 category 
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I have one anecdotal Stumble story. One day, I received a humorous email. I thought it was good enough to post in a related blog of mine. In fact, I thought it was so good that after I posted it, I Stumbled it too. I did not expect anything big.
A couple days later I was reviewing some stats about the blog, and I noticed a spike of “type in or referral traffic” over a period of 2 days. The numbers were simple HUGE – on days 1 about 10 times the norm, on the second day about 5 times. Then it dropped back to normal.
At first it did not compute – then I remembered the Stumble I did. Unfortunately, although the traffic leaped over that 2 day period, income did not vary much above normal. Wow. If I had known I would get that good response I might have set up some kind of “special” over those days. Wow.