Fans of bit.ly, DiggBar, ow.ly, or any of the gazillion URL shorteners out there will object. They will ask, “What makes su.pr so special?”

StumbleUpon has done a great job at putting together the best features that are available on some shorteners and added a few things that that are less common or completely unique.  The only thing they haven’t done yet is properly publicize this amazing package of a URL shortener.

You probably know these things…

• It shortens URLs as small or smaller than anyone else with a 4-character domain
• You can post to Twitter and Facebook like a few of the shorteners, as well as thumbing up and reviewing on StumbleUpon itself
• It has very decent real-time analytics that give separates out clicks from stumbles, shows retweets, and displays accounts that thumbed up the content on SU.
• A Firefox browser bookmarklet is available.

You may not know the following tidbits of information which, at least for us, sealed the deal:

• Bloggers using WordPress can shorten URLs on their own domain.  Joshua Eichorn, who assisted SU on the project, details how things work with the plugin.
• Sites not built on WordPress can also take advantage of short URLs on their own domain.
• Unlike some shorteners, the WordPress plugin for su.pr allows bloggers to create search engine friendly URLs with 301 redirects.
• The presence of an API will allow for more apps to be developed as well as integration with pre-existing services.

With all of this going for it, it’s a wonder that StumbleUpon has been rather shy in its rollout.  Closer examination reveals that su.pr has the features that exceed the capabilities of the other shorteners out there. It can help to generate traffic like Diggbar and Reddit’s shortener, it has the tracking and API capabilities of bit.ly and ow.ly, and it can be integrated with sites very cleanly.

To us, it’s no contest.

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Read more about social media marketing on this blog.

Over at Social News Watch, we’re trying to compile a complete list of social media sites.  There are so many out there — tons of brand new ones and a ton of old ones that might have been forgotten.

Whether for marketing or simple enjoyment, it’s good to have a complete list.  While submitting to thousands of sites might prove to be counter-productive, we plan on breaking down the list into several different versions so that everyone has a chance to find the ones they really like and want to use.

Head over to SNW and see what you can add to the conversation, or simply post the sites that you know (or lists of sites already put together) and we will begin the long process of finding, checking, and classifying the sites into something manageable.

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Read more about social media websites on Soshable.

There are many social media addicts in this world.  You see it every day on Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon.  Even Propeller, Mixx, and Newsvine have their share.  What you may or may not know is whether or not you are one of them.

It’s often tough to recognize.  Perhaps the joy of seeing your first story on the front page of the site was enough to set you off.  Maybe it’s a desire to promote your point of view, a political candidate, even your own blog or business.  For some, it’s something that passes the time (until too much time has passed).  Read these signs below and seek immediate help if 3 or more apply to you.

1. When you hear breaking news on the radio, you immediately pull over and whip out your laptop or cell phone to see if it has been submitted.  Sometimes, you whip out your laptop or cell phone without pulling over.
2. This sentence makes sense to you: “I almost FPd a Jobs fanboy submit, but the brigade buried it off upcoming.”
3. One or two nights a week are spent listening to The Drill Down and the Social Blend at The Mixxing Bowl.
4. Your GTalk is loaded with people you’ve never met, never actually spoken to, and whose name may or may not be real, but somehow you feel a close kinship with them.
5. Any time you play cards, a spade makes you think of a guy named Muhammad.
6. You had plants, as far as you can recall, but there are now just baskets of dirt with dead brown leaves in them.  You vaguely remember having a dog as well.  Also, there’s a strange smell in your apartment.
7. Some (or all) of the following groups of apparently random letters and numbers means something to you: QGYH2sbutkicGt2099dexlovex27hlmoojj.
8. Regardless of what kind of computer you have, you claim to have a Mac.  If you are bold enough to admit that you own a PC, you at least run Firefox as your browser.
9. Story, video, and image quality are important to you, but not as important as the headline.
10. The Presidential race may or may not be important to you, but either way, your main reason for wishing the primaries were over is to stop reading headlines about Ron Paul.
11. Within 0.03 seconds, you can look at a cute picture of an animal and know whether or not it was photoshopped.
12. Your feed list is longer than your grocery list

In the real world, we pick our friends based upon certain traits and conditions.  We want people we can like who have shared interests and who have a certain proximity to us.  The Internet has changed the proximity aspect of friendship, but we still need to be able to interact with our friends in some way to truly be friends.

In social media, “friendship” is more of a way to get votes for your submissions than to interact with others.  There are certainly those who make real friends through social media.  Some of the people I interact with on a daily basis were people I met on social media sites.  Still, the bottom line in social media friendship is “vote for my submissions and I’ll vote for yours.”

There is something skewed about this concept, but we’ll ignore it for this article.  Instead, we’ll accept the fact that most social media friends aren’t really friends and focus on how to be a good one, as well as finding other good ones.

Good Social Media Friends Submit Good Content

It seems like a no-brainer, but it needs to be stated.  I submit stories that I think are worth reading and I expect my friends to do the same.  If someone submits the occasional crappy story or self-promotional piece, I don’t mind as long as the majority of their stuff is good.

Good Social Media Friends Vote for MOST of Your Submissions

I remember getting a message from a social media powerhouse one time that said “Vote for all of my s__t and I’ll try to vote for most of yours.”  Arrogant, pompous, but hey, at least he was being honest.  The idea of blind-voting for all of your friends’ submissions is a flawed one for some sites.  Digg and StumbleUpon take the number of stories you Digg or Thumb Up into account when determining the quality of your submissions, so hitting everything submitted is definitely a bad idea.

I have been running an experiment over the last couple of weeks with this, just to make sure that it was true.  A week and a half ago, I was putting 1-4 stories a day on the front page of Digg and getting a decent level of stumbles on my submissions.  Once I started ramping up my Diggs, hitting everything submitted by my hundreds of friends, I started noticing that it was taking longer and longer to hit the front page.  Once I had a great weburbanist submission get 194 diggs in the first 24 hours and NOT make the front page, my over-digging theory was confirmed.

Reddit, Propeller, and Mixx, on the other hand, seem to not mind blind voting.  In fact, it helps your status to vote more on Propeller and Mixx.  Still, many people watch for blind voters and either sink them or avoid them altogether.

As a general rule, vote for the submissions that are good.  If you would have considered submitting it, it’s worth your Digg/Stumble/Upmod/Vote.

Good Social Media Friends Keep Messaging Their Submissions to a Minimum

Sending stories on social media sites is okay if used only when necessary.  If it’s really, really, really good, you should consider spreading the word.  Don’t spam, and don’t accept friends who spam you.  If you’re getting every submission from a user sent to you, send them a message and ask them to slow it down.  If they don’t remove them.  Don’t be a spammer and don’t reward spammers with your friendship.

Good Social Media Friends Communicate with Each Other Every Now and Then

One of the best ways to really be a friend is to communicate.  It may take some time, especially if you have hundreds or thousands of friends, but take the time occasionally to drop your friends a line.  Thank them for voting for your submissions every once in a while.  Compliment them for finding a particularly incredible piece of media. Just say “hi” from time to time.  Some won’t appreciate it and will think you are trying to game them.  Most won’t mind it at all.

Good Social Media Friends Defend Each Other

This is a minor point normally, but in some cases, it’s a big deal.  If one of your good social media friends is getting bashed by a troll, help your friend out.  Bury the troll’s negative comment.  Write one in reply that defends your friend.  You wouldn’t let your best friend in real life get bashed and you shouldn’t let your social media friend get bashed either.

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The best social media submitters have friends.  Lots of them.  Making the right friends and working with them the right way is possibly the most important aspect of being successful on social media.  Someone with no friends can submit a picture of Elvis walking around in the forest with Bigfoot and it will never make the front page of any social media site.  It’s a flaw in the systems, but it’s one we have to deal with for now.  Might as well make the most of it.

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Social Media blogs are everywhere.  Heck, you’re at one right now!

This post has been moved to “Sharing on StumbleUpon“.

Oops!  Moojj did it again.  Our favorite programmer and social media user down under has used his combined of “what we need” and “how to build it” and put out a killer tool for StumbleUpon users across the universe.

Introducing the StumbleUpon Alerter.  Slick and sleak, this tool can be extremely useful for those trying to crack into the enigmatic SU elite status.  As mysterious as Digg, Reddit, and the “pure” social media sites are, StumbleUpon has always had the most difficult algorithm to understand along with the fewest tracking tools available.  It’s unique format and the sheer difficulty of classifying it (is it really a social media site?) make this tool an invaluable add to every stumbler’s system tray.

Here’s what it does, straight from the site:

• Plays a sound whenever a person reviews your discoveries
• Plays a sound when one of your discoveries is liked
• Displays a list of your discoveries on StumbleUpon
• Shows a list of people who have rated your sites
• Lists all of the reviews for your discoveries
• Ranks your friends in order of most reviews
• Made with the same interface as StumbleUpon

Instead of going into the details, which you can get from the post itself, let’s make a semi-obvious statement and leave it open for a future post about it.  Bottom line, I want to know how it can be used to be a better stumbler.  There are several ideas that come to mind, such as friend-selection for those who are at or near their 200 friend level, dumping sources that aren’t getting any play, keeping track of how many times a particular site has been discovered, and then there is the research.  Just the research aspect alone makes this tool a tremendous asset for stumblologists.

We’ll play with it for a week and report our findings.  In the meantime, download it and play with it yourself.  It doesn’t cost that much — oh, about none.

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Read more stories about StumbleUpon on this blog.

This Guest Post Courtesy of Mark Dykeman of Broadcasting Brain Fame

Is SU a Performance Enhancing Drug for Blogs?

The long term impact of using social media to boost your blog readership is frequently debated by social media users.  Some people yearn for the server-crashing success of hitting Digg’s front page.  Other people seem to prefer the less dramatic, smoother influx of traffic from a site like StumbleUpon.  Either way, sometimes it feels like you need a fix of DFP (Digg Front Page) or StumbleJuice in order to keep your stats high.  Is that a good thing?  I wonder.

I’ll admit it:  I used to submit a lot of my own stuff to places like Shoutwire, Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon.  It didn’t make for the smoothest of starts to social media, especially because I hadn’t met any other social media users yet.  Fortunately, I found some good articles on using social media (Tamar’s articles were very helpful; I wish Muhammed Saleem had written his guide when I first started!) and I’ve learned a lot.

I’ve learned to appreciate social news and other social media sites for what they are and I’ve gotten a lot of enjoyment from finding and submitting other people’s material to these sites, as well as voting up their submissions.  I’ve also become a regular blogger in this time and have become focused on building up Broadcasting Brain.  I rarely submit my own posts to social media sites anymore…

With one big exception.  StumbleUpon.  I became addicted to Stumble juice and using it to enhance my page views.

Without getting into specifics, I can say that Stumbled posts seem to get up to 10x of the “unjuiced” traffic that the same posts would get.  I’m sure other people see better results.  That’s pretty darned attractive.  However, it still requires me to do some promotional work, either solo or with a helper or two, to get the Stumble traffic.

Yesterday, I wrote a new post about Digg which I though was fairly good.  I didn’t Stumble it myself, nor did I ask for Stumble assistance.

So I waited to see what would happen.

My page views increased… sluggishly.  Very very slowly.

I stayed firm.  Finally, probably about 12 hours after I posted the story, someone discovered it and Stumbled it.  As I predicted, it increased traffic by roughly 10x.

The increase in traffic was wonderful, but it felt fake, knowing that it was enhanced by Stumble juice.  It does make me wonder how much social media tends to enhance blog stats, though.  Or does it jump start them instead?

Athletes get in trouble for using performance enhancing drugs.  It would seem that social media is our steroid, our juice.

Is that a good thing, or a bad thing?  I’m not sure.  What do you think?

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Find more Social Media Articles or check out some of our social media recommendations.