Wow, Monday was quite the rollercoaster ride for EdgeHopper.com. Apparently, someone named GST on Reddit.com submitted my post “What Toyota knows that GM doesn’t” to his Reddit list at around 7:45 in the morning (Thanks GST). By 9:00 am., I was getting emails and Tweets that my site was down. Apparently, I was exceeding my CPU quota:
So, we worked through getting this little fun fixed and EdgeHopper was back up and running…for about 20 minutes. Then I started getting getting Tweets about a 503 error that looked like this:
My host was unable to handle the traffic on a shared server. They were gracious enough to move EdgeHopper to another server for a while and that fixed the problem (Thanks Bluehost!).
So, why is this relevant to you? Well, in less than 3 hours from the time GST posted the link on Reddit, EdgeHopper.com experienced in excess of 350,000 hits, even with all the interruptions in service! This was because the link on Reddit moved into the top 3 on their “What’s Hot” list. Wired.com also picked up on it and it made into Wired’s top 3 Hottest Web Links (mostly because it’s based on Reddit’s list). By the end of the day, just this one single post had been linked to and referred to by 317 other websites and blogs mostly because of what you see in the image below:
These numbers are super relevant to you. Not because my blog had a good day…that’s completely irrelevant. Because they emphasize the value and power of social media to you, your blog, your company, whatever! If you do something that people find remarkable, timely, relevant, etc., and someone else uses word of mouth to spread the goodness around, you win! This is the power of word of mouth. The traffic my blog experienced in 3 hours was about 100 times what it usually is thanks not only to some compelling content, but more because of someone that I don’t know talking it up. And, the sheer number of inbound links suggests that people who read the post, told two people they knew, and they told two friends and they told two friends, and so on and so on and so on…(remember the old Breck Shampoo commercials?). As I am writing this post, the Toyota/GM post already has just over 865,000 hits, 427 comments on Reddit.com, and 95 direct comments in less than 2 days (thanks to everyone who visited and commented)! So, the next time you’re wondering about the power of word of mouth and social media, just remember this little post. Oh yeah, that, and make sure you get a hosting provider that can handle big traffic!
NOTE: If and when you get a day like EdgeHopper had on Monday, remember, you have a lot of work to do to sustain those numbers. The day after my BIG day, I was back to just over 88,000 hits, a little more than 10% of the previous day’s traffic. EpiBlogger has a great post on this he calls Digg: A Bloggers One Night Stand. While big numbers are fun and exciting, sustaining them is hard work!
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7 Responses
November 19th, 2008 at 6:34 am
Well done. An inspiration. I’ve been blogging for all of three weeks, so a little way to go before I hit those numbers: http://clearthoughtconsulting.wordpress.com/ - any advice for upping my visability would be greatly appreciated.
Have you turned any of the interest into business?
November 19th, 2008 at 8:42 am
Wow that sounds like quite the day! Good to hear your site survived the onslaught.
Thanks for the link to Epiblogger! Appreciate it.
November 19th, 2008 at 8:53 am
PINGBACK http://geopdf.blogspot.com/2008/11/chris-spagnuolo-on-social-media.html
…Check out developer/geo-blogger Chris Spagnuolo’s facts on “The power of social media”. Isn’t it absolutely facinating how fast a popular article can spread throughout the world wide web? Thanks to Chris for passing along the statistics of one such article!…
November 19th, 2008 at 8:59 am
just saw the power of this yesterday when we had a blogger review our beta platform. We had more requests in one day than we’ve had all month. http://www.thegetsmartblog.com/2008/11/insideup-the-source-for-business-services/
November 19th, 2008 at 9:43 am
I find a good 15% of my traffic comes from these social media sites (and a function which allows my visitors to send a page directly to their friends)
There’s nothing like word of mouth advertising to send your site skyrocketing to the top!
November 19th, 2008 at 10:01 am
It’s not only going to be with blogs but with business and products/services as well.
November 20th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
Chris, I have seen this before, and it is indeed amazing what references can do for attracting attention. Now imagine if you could click right through into your business web site where you provide the details that turn curiosity into prospect into customer. Rally Software has always been in the forefront of attracting attention this way, that is how I first found out about it. While I do not see myself progressing across the line from curiosity to prospect, that is because I pursue a different paradigm, even as I embrace Agile for projects where I have a good use for it: this has been very successful, by the way.
While we sometimes agree to disagree, I always enjoy the posts and replies that they generate. It may be a sobering thought, but more people and firms should consider how they can raise sharing ideas to an art as true examples of networking. I think that by raising awareness in your posts you are a true example of what networking is about.
Keep up the good work.
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