Social Media Power
I'd like to share a demonstration of the power of social media. Saturday evening I posted an uninformed screed about the topic of the day, the Danger data loss. Normally when I post something the FeedBurner reach is just under 100. Louis Gray shared this particular post, and its reach shot up to 240. Now consider: this was on a Sunday, and the post carried a vague title which did not indicate much about its contents, yet it spread more widely than anything else I've posted.
Louis's shared items feed is in turn republished in various places: on friendfeed in Louis's and in Kol Tregaskes's streams and in the lgshareditems twitter stream, among others. In this instance I don't think those secondary republishings had an effect, as the Analytics data doesn't show clicks from other sources. Nonetheless in other cases as links ripple through the social media ecosystem, the cumulative effect in drawing more attention could be substantial. Twitter in particular has a snowballing effect if an item is widely retweeted.
