Have you tried using StumbleUpon yet? If you are anything like me you are probably growing a little weary of the myriad of gimmicky social networks and novelty widgets. Well perhaps the fact that the social space is so saturated is exactly the reason I get excited when I find one I really like and even find useful.

Stumble upon is a social bookmarking services that allows members to create a list of favorite websites via a browser tool bar. It is these favorites that you can easily share with friends on the stumble upon network. However it’s not this that I like so much. I mean, already have a ton places where I can save favorites. No, what makes this service so great is the magical stumble button on the toolbar. When you click the stumble button a page will be presented to you that matches your list of interests (you setup your areas of interests when you register). Nine times out of ten I am thrilled by the hidden gem of a website retrieved upon clicking the stuble button. This is why I like Stumble Upon.

Now the reason I find it useful is because I have seen the true viral power of this service. About 2 weeks ago a client noticed a drastic spike in traffic and was trying to determine the source. After spending a few minutes digging through the log files I saw that the traffic was coming from stumbleupon, a service I had heard of but never tried.

Further inspection revealed that this spike turned into a 600% increase in visitor traffic for the week. By far this was the busiest week this company had seen in traffic and sales reflected this increase.

So not only is stumbleupon downright entertaining there is some real, easily implemented marketing value as well.

Give it a try yourself. www.stumbleupon.com