Blogosphere hit parade
Man, I love getting tagged to participate in blogger memes, especially when they require me to spend a substantial amount of time digging through my historical stats. My buddy Scott Monty, responding to a prompt from Patrick Schaber at The Lonely Marketer, has written a post calling attention to the six most popular entries in his blog's archives. And he's tagged me to respond in kind. Lucky for Scott, I'm a good sport -- but in this case, I was also more than happy to play along because I thought it would give me some interesting insights into what's working best.
Scott culled his most popular posts based on the traffic each has generated, but I figured I'd put a twist on his meme. Here are three of my most popular posts, each chosen based on a different key metric: traffic, commentary and inbound links:
The Most Traffic: Fail your way to success in viral marketing is my most-read post by a factor of more than three-to-one, fueled by mentions in both Adweek and (interestingly enough) TreoCentral.
The Greatest Amount of Conversation: Last week's Am I a feed floozie? generated more comments than any other post I've written, with the prior day's post, Maybe you shouldn't advertise, coming in a close second.
The Most Attention from Other Bloggers: By a long shot, that would be Nielsen BuzzMetrics CGM Summit is a no blog zone, from way back in October 2006. Not only did this post garner the greatest number of links, but it also brought in some high profile links from Steve Rubel, Jeff Jarvis, Stowe Boyd and Boing Boing, not to mention a spot on TechMeme.
So after all this, what great insight have I gleaned? Frankly, I'm not sure -- these posts are so different from one another. And none of them are among my personal favorites from the past eight or so months, which leads me to one final (and perhaps the most important) measure of "popularity." These are some of the posts that have given me the greatest satisfaction, that I feel are most consistent with my general views on new media and marketing, that come closest to nailing my vision for this blog. These are just a few of the posts that rank among the most popular with my favorite audience of one, ME.
Are you a giver? Probably not.
Do you make your customers uncomfortable?
If you're a new reader or just missed some of my updates, these posts provide as good a hit list as any. I hope you enjoy them.
