Getting Redd

As seen on Sitemeter, there was an explosion of traffic on Fractals of Change Wednesday afternoon (pictured here) which actually continued pretty much continued unabated through Thursday afternoon.  This sometimes happens when I write about something very current or very controversial.  Another Sitemeter view showed that these readers were linking in to a two year old post about negotiating. Curious.

MyBlogLog (above) showed that almost all of this new traffic was coming from Reddit. Clearly someone there kicked off the flurry with a vote for this old post.  Most likely this person read the old post because I’d linked to it in my then current post since both are in the occasional series “Morph of a Nerd CEO”.

Is there a viral marketing lesson in this; something new about Web 2.0?  We already know that digg and Reddit and a number of other sites can kick off a storm of page views so that’s not new.  What’s interesting is that such an old post was the destination of all these visitors.  That, of course, is only possible because storage is so cheap that posts hang around forever(?). An old magazine article simply wouldn’t be easily accessible so it either gets attention immediately or disappears.  Chris Anderson calls this the endless shelf that nothing ever gets pushed off: it’s a long tail phenomenon.

But stuff on the shelf still needs to get found.  New stuff always gets a cursory look.  Old stuff has to work for attention.  So the lesson, if there is one, is that if you want to get any value from the old stuff you have on the shelf, use your new stuff to point back to it.  Sometimes you’ll get Redd that way.

Side note is that these visitors are averaging almost two page views each which is unusually high on this blog.  The are, it turns out, reading other posts in the same series which makes sense.  They are also becoming subscribers at a higher than normal rate for new visitors – probably because the blog has a lot of content similar to the post they came for.

If you’re a new reader who came through Reddit (or any other way), welcome.