Some time back, I wrote a post called 'Social Media - It's About Breadcrumbs and Conversations' that was an attempt to show how mastered content (think: videos, blog posts, pictures) could become viral by being used as comment fodder in responding to other people's posts, discussion group threads and within social networks.
I built upon those concepts in a post called 'Why I Blog: It’s about Brand, not Bread' where I attempted to spotlight how blogging for most is less of a monetary source than a brand, identity, online visibility and conversational flow cultivation tool -- assuming that you have something substantive to say.
Now, thanks to URL shortening services, like bit.ly, you can get analytics visibility on which breadcrumbs generate what clicks (sidebar: I call a comment made in the comment section of another person's post that references a post you wrote, including the URL and a call to action, a breadcrumb).
With that as a backdrop, consider a post that I wrote last week called 'ANALYSIS - iPhone 3.0 Developer Preview: Block the Kick Strategy' which, as the title suggests, is an analysis of the iPhone 3.0 Developer Preview.
To promote it, I did a couple of separate tweets, posted a copy of the post on my O'Reilly blog, responded to articles on the Apple event with comments on 15+ blogs and major media pubs, referenced my post in status updates on LinkedIn and Facebook, and referenced the post in the comment sections of two different mobile discussion groups within LinkedIn.
What is interesting is that the majority of general purpose tech blogs generated less than 3% of the clicks; LinkedIn was about double (the groups were a big factor there); and the Apple-centric blogs, as expected, drove the biggest traffic kick.
Somewhat surprisingly, WSJ's All Things Digital generated almost as much traffic as the Apple-centric blogs. Facebook and Twitter yielded me very little click goodness based on the data.
You can view the actual analytics data here: http://bit.ly/info/ANdMz or just check out graphic below.
