I was recently introduced to the website StumbleUpon.  I didn’t give it much thought until this past Thursday evening.  Me and my blogging pals sometimes share tips via email.  So last Thursday I was exchanging emails with Mark Graban of the Lean Blog and Peter Abilla of shmula.  We decided to do a little test with StumbleUpon. 

We each downloaded the StumbleUpon toolbar which is free and takes about 1 minute to install.  Then, since we all like each others blogs we went to the others blog and pressed the StumbleUpon “thumbs up” button which appears in the the toolbar.  This is what you do when you like a website or blog.  By pressing the thumbs up StumbleUpon then shares your site with other “stumblers.”

Here is what happened in my case.  Pete and Mark both gave me a thumbs up at around 8:45 PM CST Thursday night.  That is two people.  The next day I checked my site statistics and almost fell out of my chair when I saw my traffic spike by over 600% from 9:00 PM to 11:00 PM.  The huge spike leveled off but I am still getting a massive amount of traffic from StumbleUpon.

With this said… I had an idea for how we could literally spread Lean and Six Sigma with thousands of of people who may have never even heard of Lean or Six Sigma.  If everyone that reads this blog installed StumbleUpon and then gave the “thumbs up” to your favorite Lean and Six Sigma blogs we could literally create a Lean and Six Sigma web tipping point.

Of course I would love to have you give this blog the thumbs up, assuming you like what you read, but I also hope you give all the other excellent Lean and Six Sigma blogs thumbs up too.  Just check out my Blogroll to the right if you need help finding them.  They are all great and definitely deserve thumbs up!

And here is the coolest part of all.  You can give a thumbs up more than once.  In fact if you read 5 different posts from the same blog just click on each post to get its unique URL displayed and then give each unique post the thumbs up.

Lastly, the Stumble button is super cool.  You can stumble by keyword if you want.  So, for example, if you typed Lean Manufacturing as the keyword and then hit the stumble button you will come across different websites and blogs about Lean Manufacturing.  This is much more fun than the old Google search if you ask me!  Give it a shot.  You can also use it for any search.  If you like the Dallas Cowboys type that in as a keyword and stumble away.

To make it as easy as possible I have added some links below each post allowing people to submit that particular post to StumbleUpon as well as a few other popular social networking sites like Digg and de.licio.us.

Have fun stumbling and Happy Memorial Day to all of my American friends!