On Saturday, I did a post noting that I wasn't going to call a winner yet in last week's blogging competition...there were four posts that were simply too close to one another for me to do so. What happened next is highly instructive. One of the posts surged well ahead of the others in traffic thanks to the power of social media. This is precisely the point of what I was trying to teach, so I'm proud to single out the winning post:
“The past is key to the present and savior of the future,” by Corinne Myers & Erin Saupe.
Now, this post didn't necessarily have the most eye-grabbing title. But what it did have was social media distribution...including 3 stumbles, a strong Facebook showing and respectable Twitter referrals, all of which added up to well over 500 pageviews so far. That may sound like a low total; but remember, this post was competing with 16 others that went up within hours of each other, making social media crucial in terms of getting it noticed. I admit that declaring the winner today is somewhat arbitrary, as another post could still surge. Next time I will set a firm deadline to avoid this problem. But since I didn't set one, I've got to cut it off sometime, and I've already let a lot of time pass. It's the sixth day, and Myers & Saupe are well ahead at this point, and have been for some time. So congratulations to them for their efforts!--and you can read their post here. But I also want to single out another post that made quite a run for it: "A Geek is a Terrible Thing to Waste." Check it out too--it receives second place, or honorable mention. I'm also posting some holdover posts from the workshop that didn't get a chance to run yet. Look for those in the next couple of days.
