The Agitator

Here’s a good NY Times article re the challenge of — and tools for — gettng other netizens to pass along your online content.

For nonprofit fundraisers and cause advocates, there’s probably no breakthrough news here … we’ve all heard of viral marketing. Still, the piece is effective in presenting the challenge and its huge importance. "Sharing is sexy" says one blog urging its readers to spread its message.

Says the Times:

"In the last century, traditional media organizations hustled to get their product in front of the chatty elites; news magazines, for example, hand-delivered copies over the weekend to politicians and to other media. In the age of Twitter and Facebook, anyone can become a chatty elite, the social director of his or her own private admiration society. The hand-delivered copy has morphed into a Web article’s “share to Facebook” button.

Underscoring the trend, social networks are now an important source of traffic to many sites, in some cases challenging search engines as the top source of new visitors. For example, the leading referrer to PerezHilton.com, a popular gossip site, is Facebook. Nearly 15 percent of the gossip site’s visitors come from the social network, according to Compete.com, a tracking firm. Google ranks second, driving about 9 percent of visitors."

I was intrigued by this last point about social nets driving an increasingly greater percentage of traffic to  other websites. That’s something every nonprofit webmaster should be monitoring. I suspect what’s true about traffic sources for a gossip site isn’t necessarily true for, say, the American Cancer Society’s website. But it might be true, or about to become true, for a site like Amnesty international.

I would find this a "turning point" metric for a nonprofit website … i.e., when do you get more traffic from social net sources than from search engines? When that happens, I’d be prepared to move "social media" up a notch in my priorities.

Anybody running this kind of comparison?

Tom