I had something pretty cool happen to me the other day.
On April 23, I visited the Blog of the Houston Chronicle’s Cartoonist, Nick Anderson. He had a pretty funny animated clip of Hillary Clinton & her presidential campaign, and wanted to submit it to Digg. (Check out the post & read all of the comments.)
Unfortunately, digg gave me an error message when I tried to submit it, so I decided to send Nick Anderson a blog comment asking him about his video. Which started a very interesting dialogue that gave me an interesting new insight into the power of the internet.
- 10:08am - My first comment to Nick Anderson: “That’s hilarious! Are you going to post this on YouTube? You definitely should.”
- 11:36am - Nick Anderson responded to my comment: “Yes…later today or tomorrow.”
- 6:00pm - I responded: “Hi Nick… What’s your YouTube channel/username? Or are you just gonna post the YouTube-link to the video here on your blog?”
- 10:34pm - Nick Anderson responded: “Bukowsky, the link to my channel is http://www.youtube.com/user/andertoon I haven’t done much with it, yet. The animations tend to get a lot more views when they are posted on the Chronicle’s channel, but I’ve started putting some of them into mine recently. I’ll get this animation posted
This is where it starts to get interesting. I’m not sure why, but is last response made me laugh. It almost seemed like a challenge, and I was pretty confident that if I got one of his YouTube video’s to the front page of Digg or go popular on StumbleUpon or Reddit, that I could get him at least 1,000 views on YouTube. So, I left him this response:
- 11:30pm - “Probably… What do you want to bet, that I can get your Move Over Obama Girl video to over 1,000 views by the end of the week?”
I didn’t even give him a chance to respond, because I knew that it was possible. So, first thing that next morning, I submitted the below video to all of the social media sites.
I then left Nick Anderson this comment:
- 8:40am - “The race to 1000 Views has officially started…. The Move Over Obama Girl video is currently is sitting at 359 views on YouTube. Let’s see how long it takes to reach 1,000.”
- 1:58pm - Nick Anderson simply responded: “Did you post it somewhere?”
- 2:26pm - I responded back with a bunch of links to where I submitted the ‘Move Over Obama Girl’ YouTube animation
Apparently, there were some random readers of his blog, that started to get into it, because at 9:46pm that next night, somebody called flypusher left this comment:
- 9:46pm - “I just bumped it to 925!!”
It was pretty cool to read what flypusher wrote, because I was constantly hitting refresh on the YouTube video page, just to see how many views it now has.
Long Story short, the ‘Move Over Obama Girl’ animation did well on both Digg & StumbleUpon, but failed miserably on Reddit. Although, it didn’t make the Front Page of digg, the final result was 155 diggs & 6 comments. It did exceptionally well on StumbleUpon, and was prominently featured on popurls.com. However, the folks over at Reddit voted it down within minutes of it being submitted.
That very next morning, at 8:56am, I checked and the video had 1,364 views! So, basically, within 24 hours, this video on YouTube received over 1,000 views, ALL because I submitted it to different Social Media sites. I could only imagine how many views it got if it hit the Front Page of digg.
22 Comments Received
That’s an awesome video and a great story. Why do you think it got voted down so quickly at Reddit?
Neat story. Amazing how powerful social media is huh?
It didn’t hurt that his video is cool.
I wish I had something cool that you could pimp. lol
:O)
George
The power of the internet is huge! It allows a voice from everyone to be heard!
Wow….over 1000 views within 24 hours is pretty good. I can only get less than 20 views within 24 hours.
Thanks for posting that… definitely going to start checking out Nick Anderson’s work on a regular basis.
What should we do without internet? And, without blogging?
The power of the internet is truly amazing. I love how it gets things done.
I believe I was just 2702!
nice video. gona check him out.
That is the power of internet which makes everything popular in short time.
Great idea! This clearly shows how easy social media can be manipulated if you know what you’re doing … finally someone had the guts to show exactly how it works
Internet can do all sorts of magic, huh? Nice story.
But shockingly it is difficult to get something useful out of social media sites. Perhaps I have got a few useful information from there.
Internet has many great opportunities for us. I think there are lots of people with an Internet business, that can benefit from social media sites.
interesting story about the benefits social media sites can have on a site.
Youtube is the best place for me to visit even while reading blogs. From Hard Candy to James brown “I feel good”, I can hear anything. I love it!
I think you have a great idea. Utilizing Social media sites like you did is very, very smart in this Web 2.0 world we currently live in. Nice story. Glad the ‘power of the internet’ worked for you.
~John
social media has superb power i got around 48k on a single joke on my site fm stumble upon
Nice post… I believe one of the best ways to prove the power of Internet, is through the use of social media sites.
Hi, Thanks for posting this. That’s really a great idea to show how fast social media can be manipulated.
Hi, that’s a pretty cool story. It’s amazing the things that you can do on the internet, huh?
Awesome Jeff! Love seeing that kinda stuff in action. Makes yah feel good to doesn’t it.
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