#digg it!: initial experimental results — and let’s try it again!

please digg, retweet, and follow on twitter

Update, 2:30 PM: please also digg and retweet the Nordstrom action alert

Update 4:30 PM: Jen Nedeau’s Can social media save the day? has more

Last Friday’s #Digg it! A proposal for women of color, feminists, and progressives on Twitter experiment went remarkably well for a first attempt.  Here’s the data.

Two of the for posts sent to Twitter with a #digg tag got significant retweeting.  While it’s hard to know for sure, looking at the names of the diggers it seems that we were also getting some additional diggs via Twitter.  The table below also includes the total number of diggs as of 3 PM Pacific time on Friday

Eight retweets may not sound like a lot, But looking at it differently, those 8 retweets reached over 700 followers plus however many people are following the #topprog, #lgbt, and #jti* channels — and had a measurable impact on digg results.  According to retweetist popular URLs get retweeted by over 100 people in a 24 hour period so there’s clearly significant upside here.  And of course there are lessons about how to do it better.

Like I say, great results for a first attempt.

So let’s try it again!  Please digg and retweet.

And please also digg at least one of the first posts (1, 2, 3, 4).  While it’s too late to get any of them on to digg’s front page, this is still a very useful way of tracking how far this discussion has spread.  Thanks!

To follow along on Twitter, using the new improved magic incantation.*

Additional discussion, and a little more data, below the fold.

It was interesting to watch the numbers for my post on “#digg it” and PunditMom’s on Lilly Ledbetter, both of which were both linked to in the original post:

• Overnight, the diggs were just coming from a few people I had emailed and those who saw it via Twitter; PunditMom’s post got 9 diggs, mine got 5.
• On Friday morning, I emailed a couple of mailing lists with links to diggs for both posts, explaining that the experiment.  In the next 90 minutes or so my post got 13 diggs and PunditMom’s got 6.
• By a little after noon on Friday, people started to retweet my message and in the next hour my post got 4 diggs and PunditMom’s got 2 tweets
• Over the rest of the day we each got about 5 diggs.

There were clearly a couple of things that could have gone better.  More in the comments.

Looking at the detailed search results*** from Twitter shows that the pattern with Jen aka HumanFolly’s tweet was very different and I think much more organic.  The retweets on my post were primarily from people who had heard about it from me it via email or Facebook.  This is a great way to get an experiment like this off the ground but isn’t long-term sustainable.  By contrast if you look at the retweets on her post, it’s a very natural pattern.  Julia Rosen of Courage Campaign saw a reference to her video and thanked Jen, retweeting in the process; others picked it up because it looked interesting.  In addition to reaching the readers of #topprog multiple times, the eight retweeters had a total of over 700 followers.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record: great results for a first attempt, so let’s try it again.

Please digg and retweet.

jon

* new revised magic incantation: digg ( #topprog OR #fem2 OR #woc OR #LGBT  )

** See Join the Impact: taking social network activism (and LGBTQ rights) to the next level why I’m not surprised that it was the LGBTQ-related post that got the best results right out of the gate even though they weren’t mentioned in my original post.

*** in another example of Twitter search geekiness, the URL I linked to here uses the Twitter max_id to limit it to searches from last Friday or earlier