Making Friends and Spreading Memes

marshallclark — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 00:46:07 +0000

A Case Study on Social Media Publishing & Analysis
Marshall Clark – Head of Search, Organic

As a follow-up to my earlier ‘Futurecasting Social Search’ presentation at the 2008 Search Insider Summit; in Summer 2009 I wrote an article for the Organic blog ‘ThreeMinds’ titled ‘Docs are Old School, Why We Need PageRank for People’.

The central idea was that Google’s PageRank algorithm was becoming obsolete by continuing to assign reputation to web documents/URLs at a time when the web is moving to syndication and distributed content. The article also outlined a novel solution to the problem by assigning reputation to content authors via a system integrating Social Graph data, OpenID, and existing search ranking strategies.

Following publication I launched a campaign promoting the article through a variety of social media channels – the following case study documents results and learnings from this campaign.

The Results
The promotion campaign for the ‘PageRank for People’ article was a success. Shortly after publication on ThreeMinds the article went viral on Twitter, spreading rapidly through the search and technology communities. The article was commented and retweeted by several tech luminaries including:

Dave Winer – Creator of RSS

Tim O’Reilly – Founder of O’Reilly Media & originator of term “Web 2.0”

John Battelle – Author of the book “The Search”

Leo Laporte – Founder of TWiT.tv Network & popular tech commentator

Analysis of traffic patterns showed a clear pattern of trickle-down content distribution/syndication originating from each of these Twitter Influencers.

ThreeMinds is one of the most highly visited blogs in the advertising agency world. Despite an already large volume of baseline traffic, the ‘PageRank for People’ article generated a huge boost in traffic to the ThreeMinds site, increasing total site traffic by more than 60% during one two-week period. The graph below shows total traffic to ThreeMinds for the last year with the two spikes on the right illustrating PRP traffic. Additional reports show the article was the #1 viewed article for the last year and one of the most popular posts ever published on ThreeMinds.

Traffic sources for the article were unusual as nearly all of the traffic for the post came direct from Social Media (85%+). ThreeMinds posts typically get a fairly even distribution between Direct, Referral, Search, & Social Media sources.

Learnings
In preparation for promoting the article, I talked with several top Twitter and Social Media experts to learn how to best increase the chances of having my post picked up.

Some of the things I learned:
1. Make sure your article has a name that is both catchy and descriptive. Catchy to grab people’s attention, and descriptive to let them know what they’ll get when they click-through.

2. Build a sound bite into your title, a ‘meme’, something that people can borrow, repurpose, and pass along but will still connect back to your original content. Ex: “PageRank for People”.

3. For Twitter, keep your original tweet well below the 140-character limit. This encourages users to retweet your content, since ‘Retweeters’ (yes – seriously :/ ) can add their own comments and still be below the character limit.

4. Use Bit.ly to shorten your article URL. This allows additional room for content and Bit.ly also provides some great analytics tools for tracking traffic to your post.

Other things I found as the project progressed:
1. When people retweet your content, the first thing most do is snip out your Bit.ly link and replace it with their own shortened URL link. This link still points to your same destination URL, so you still get the traffic. I’m guessing they do this to track how much traffic they send. In many cases they replaced my original Bit.ly link with their own Bit.ly link. – Fortunately Bit.ly allows you to view aggregate data for all Bit.ly links pointing to your destination URL, whether you own them or not. Smart.

2. On Twitter, Influencers are everything. Several times during the project I thought I had reached a traffic plateau, only to have a new Influencer retweet the link and deliver a new, higher traffic spike. What’s more, these traffic spikes and the prominence of the Twitterers responsible for them, tended to increase over time. This seemed to point to a hierarchical web of connections, one where influential people follow other, more influential people. Seems like with a good connection mapping program and a database of related topics, this could become something very useful for PR firms.

3. Your content will live everywhere, including some places you wish it didn’t. Several bloggers ‘borrowed’ the content of the article as the basis for a blog post, many giving little to no attribution. While there’s not much that you can do to stop this, I found that friendly comment on the blog, building on their ideas and linking back to the original article was usually permitted. In one case this even led to a productive conversation on how my original idea could be improved.

Conclusions
1. Twitter has great potential as a PR/Marketing tool, provided you can get Influencers to pick up your story.

2. Your content will be mashed-up multiple ways and spread across the web. Make sure your core concepts are tightly connected and contain at least one ‘meme-like’ component so you keep credit for your concept. See Meme-tracking and the Dynamics of the News Cycle for an analytical perspective on why this is important.

3. Keep your concepts short and memorable. This encourages distribution and commentary while reducing the effects of dilution, misinterpretation, and short attention spans.

If you have questions on anything presented in this case study please feel free to ping me on Twitter. I’m always happy to discuss.

Marshall Clark
Head of Search | Organic, Inc. | 555 Market St., 4th Floor | San Francisco, CA 94105
@marshallclark

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Making Friends and Spreading Memes