To answer #3, I’d say that it accomplishes a great task. Any kind of exposure to audiences who otherwise would’ve NEVER found you is an opportunity to show the world what you’re made of, especially if you’re a place that’s built a site that’s user-friendly, informative and designed well.

I don’t know if it can result in a spike in say, the bottom line of increasing applications, but I think that it could have an effect on other things that could be good.

Karine those are some great points about targeted vs wide net approach.

Your 3rd point (what good does it accomplish?) is right on target.

I think that some of ideas about traffic are still focused only on the advertising-supported web publishing world.

When I worked for About.com a century ago (almost literally), the name of the game in the editorial department was page view because About was selling CPM-based ads.

Today, what has become important is attracting as many visitors possible through search engine traffic, especially people who are going to bounceback like crazy — because your content isn’t what they are looking for — to make some real money with PPC ads. If they found what they are looking for why on earth would they click on your ads?

Exposure is always good as you might get a few of your prospects in that huge pool (or maybe some journos and end up on CNN). However, if resources are tighter (and it seems to be where we’re heading), I don’t think the wide-net approach is the best one.

The Web can do so much more with a targeted approach.

What are you doing looking at analytics!? Either I’ve converted you or you are a closet analytics guy afraid to accept your geeky passion. Maybe even through small nudges I was able to excite you into caring about them?

I did write a post way back about Higher Ed Marketing on StumbleUpon. The one thing I would add to that post is that StumbleUpon people are very fickle… their traffic just doesn’t stick as you have noticed. You got a huge spike, but how did your RSS subscription count grow? Also certain things work well on StumbleUpon where others don’t. That specific post did work on StumbleUpon because it was the kind of braindead fun to look at with a little fun that seems to work on that network.

As far as a power VIP StumbleUpon user… well I’ve done a little networking on that network and Digg and have a little over 100 “friends” on each. I say friends in that way because I really don’t know any of those people and they don’t really know me, we just kind of toss stuff around.

I’ve kind of slowed down my social media consumption lately as I just have way to much stuff to do lately, but still I’m going to stumble this one for you. Case Study traffic I hope your ready… But then another thing about StumbleUpon is the first page that you stumble on a site gets the biggest push.

You’ll see that there’s some disagreement in the comments about if SU traffic is valuable or not, though Kyle did add this, which I think is valuable:

“IT DOESN’T MATTER HOW GOOD YOUR SITE IS IF NOBODY IS VISITING IT!”

For a university, especially if you are doing something cool or interesting, it can be some worthy press and name recognition.