My Open Letter to a President Goes Viral (well, sort of)

As Mike very well know when I started writing in this blog, I am not the biggest fan of social networking. I was probably the last seasoned agent on the internet to sign up for Facebook & Twitter. I think it stemmed from my general dislike of real-world cocktail parties and “networking”.

I’d rather bathe my neighbor’s cat.

But as I finally finished writing my magnum opus, “An Open Letter to Philippine : Now is the time to prepare for a massive housing crisis in Asia.”. I wanted to maximize every stream of traffic to try to help as many people as possible.

Even though my forecasts showed that the second East Asian bubble will burst in 2-4 years, I felt it could happen a lot sooner. Minutes after publishing, I started my usual drill: gather lists of people who may be interested in the article — economic & investment blogs, Filipino-American organizations, and my own database. 2 days and about 750 emails letter, here’s where my traffic stood:

Direct Visitors

309 (41.36%)
*Search Engine

235 (31.45%)

Social Network

99 (13.25%)

*My top term was the “Open Letter”, but there were some other terms that comprise this number.

I knew how I got the direct traffic. I knew how I got the search engine organic search. But what I couldn’t understand is the surge in traffic from Facebook and Twitter. Oh wait, I posted it on my facebook wall, but I had a paltry hundred people in my business page. My dad loved the article so he posted it to his wall (and emailed some of his journalist friends). And from there got posted from somewhere else and liked here and there. You know how it goes. Before I knew it, I got about 100 people reading the article with–by a wide margin–the least effort. And the number has just gone up since then. It’s my most well read article since I started blogging five years ago.

That’s the power of social. Now I know. But it’s not as easy as that. Correct me if I’m wrong, but a lot of the success has to be rooted in a sound product. Phil Jackson was a great basketball coach, perhaps the best ever, but he also coached two of the best basketball players in history, Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant. I feel the same way with social marketing — if I don’t have a good product to sell — chances are it will be an uphill climb.

So would you add me, please luiz? Facebook, Twitter

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Joe Salcedo

Joe ponders about business models more than super models.He has been writing about the Reno Real Estate market since 2007 and in the summer of 2010 started ArrowCreek Homes for Sale.He hasn't seen an Entourage episode ever since.

His dream is to unabashedly propagate easy-to-understand market stats to help buyers and sellers make informed real estate decisions.He has seen too many casualties.He resides in Nevada.