bacon tumblrThe anatomy of a viral campaign
Over the weekend I got to have a firsthand experience into how things can spread virally on the web. Pretty damn cool:
11/17: SwissMiss twitters about Browser Stats. I follow SwissMiss for her quips about design stuff.
11/17: I respond to her, telling her about Methodologie’s sizer.
11/20: SwissMiss posts about it on her blog
11/20: I start to see an upswing of followers on Twitter, but can’t figure out why — I subscribe to SwissMiss’s RSS feed, but I was a bit behind in my reading and did not see her post.
11/22: My standing “Twitter Methodologie” Google search points me to a tweet from somebody named designmeme in Ontario
11/22: I tweet about that designmeme tweet thinking it was a one-off mention, still having not seen SwissMiss’s post
11/22: Clicking on designmeme’s link, it takes me to his delicious link set, which shows me 335 unique links to the Methodologie Sizer (now up to 397)
11/22: I tweet about the delicious link, blown away by how many people have linked to it but have no idea why they’ve linked to it
11/22: Working backwards in the delicious feed, I see swissmiss mentioned a couple times in the notes of people’s links, so I dig into swissmiss’s blog and find her original post about our sizer. I tweet about that discovery, and how her blog post is responsible for all 335 unique links. Looking at my time stamp from the first tweet I did on 11/22 about this phenomenon to this last one on 11/22, it was a roller-coaster of discovery for me that lasted all of half an hour.
11/24: Josh discovers the sizer on Konigi, another design blog.
11/25: SwissMiss discovers this post (through means unknown), and posts about it on her blog. The link is broken, so I’m not sure if it will affect things as much as one might expect. In my 3+ years of link-post blogging, mainly for my own enjoyment and for the semi-enjoyment of a very small number of my friends and relatives, I believe this is the first time I’ve ever had anyone link back to my site. Quite a big moment for me.
— Delicious links to Methodologie sizer up to 431 as of 10pm 2008.11.25
11/26: I’ve started actively searching on Google for posts featuring the link to the Sizer. There are a lot of “link list” and Tumblr-like collection bots out there that re-blog SwissMiss’s post. I’m trying to weed those out and only show links to the Sizer that a real person completed and spent some time posting (as opposed to having a blog that features their delicious feed, for instance). That limits it quite a bit. As of right now I’m finding it in the following spots:
On a Swiss Interactive Designer named Lueni’s “Secondbrain” site. I’m not familiar with Secondbrain, but it looks like a visual delicious of sorts, which is kind of interesting.
Fishbrains’ Jaanix site. “Jaanix lets you discover and share things that matter to people like you. You can “tune in” with clicks, sliders, ratings, tags, saves, comments, and new posts. Based on this feedback jaanix shows what is relevant to you right now.”
Some nameless person’s Tumblr site called “Newer Found”.
We’re huge in Japan. Not sure what these sites are about — they’re in Japanese.
That’s it for now.
— Delicious links to Methodologie sizer up to 438 as of 10pm 2008.11.26
(Incidentally, this is getting very meta for me, because now at least TWO people are linking back to this post (SwissMiss, linked above, and one other, who also commented below). If it keeps up, I’ll start another post documenting how that link-fest is growing.)
11.27 Smashing Magazine is currently featuring the link to the sizer (via Konigi) in it’s “Fresh Bookmarks” sidebar. No permalink, unfortunately, so here’s a screengrab.
Daniel Saxil-Nielsen (now that is a name) actually took the time to create a twitpic joke about the fact that we don’t feature stats for a 1920x1200-pixel monitor resolution. If only all websites could be designed for a 30”+ screen.
— Delicious links to Methodologie sizer up to 457 as of 10pm 2008.11.27. Note the # of links went up considerably on Thanksgiving compared to yesterday. I think it’s safe to say the bulk of these links are from outside the US.
11.28 ‘Toon’, the handle of somebody at Estetica Design Forum (A “General Web Design Forum”), posted a link to the sizer there. One person has already commented, so I thought I’d log it here in case more comments are added.
Currently, a Google search for “Methodologie Browser” yields 35,900 results. Not entirely sure how many of those results are to our actual sizer, but this is the first time that the first 20+ results all have linked to a page talking about or linking to the sizer.
— Delicious links to Methodologie sizer up to 472 as of 12:20am 2008.11.29.
