(If you follow me on twitter, you may already be sick of hearing about this. Allow me to invite you to sample some of my other wares: click on this for cute babies, or this for reviews, or this for pictures of me in a wetsuit.)
Whew.
Today I bring you a little “behind the scenes at House of Prince” story.
On Sunday after I posted my hack tutorial “What Is Twitter?” below, I tweeted it a few times and threw it up on my Facebook page. Other people liked it and re-tweeted, and they told two friends, and they told two friends, and so on. All of that was super cool and I appreciated the re-tweets and the emails.
Monday afternoon when I came back to my desk after lunch I refreshed my blog stats page and I thought something was wrong. It looked like a lot of people had visited my blog all at the same time. Normally I get about one every ten minutes because my average daily visit count has been less than 100, so this looked odd to me. I clicked on “view by referrals” which shows me where the visitors were coming from, and I saw many lines of this: “http://twitter.com/neilhimself” – and then it dawned on me.
Lots of people did come to my blog at the same time. As in, hundreds of them.
(Actual screenshot from my sitemeter page. Compare theaverage per day to the “last hour” number. Cue hysteria.)
Here’s what happened: author Neil Gaiman (who wrote, among many other things, “Coraline” which became a recent movie, for which my previous company produced the behind the scenes footage and most of the bonus features on the upcoming DVD) got wind of my post, liked it, and tweeted the link. He has over 125,000 followers. Very many of them clicked on the link and/or re-tweeted as well.
(the tweet heard ’round the world)For this marginally-popular-in-my-own-mind mommyblogger, such huge traffic is a very big deal, indeed. On top of that, the fact that an author, whose work I love and whose blog I absolutely dig, read my post and liked it is sort of mind-boggling to me. It hardly seemed real, until Mr. Gaiman actually followed me on Twitter and replied to my direct message of thanks:
Ha ha. I’ll defintely retweet that post. And congrats on Neilhimself. Wow!
for “What Is The Internet?” will you be interviewing Al Gore?
How exciting! Now you need to get yourself one of those t-shirts that says, “I’m kind of a big deal on Twitter.”
love it when good things go viral! Congrats to your success! (and hopes for more of that in the future)…
Vanidad de vanidades. Todo es vanidad. He visto de cerca todo lo que se hare bajo el sol…y oidme…todo es vanidad y vejacion del espiritu. Cuanto mayor la sabiduria mayores son los problemas mientras mas se sabe mas se sufre. Y entonces veo que lo unico que el hombre puede esperar es gozar del fruto de sus obras porque esa es su condicion.
Oh my gosh, that’s an enormous amount of traffic! Cool beans for you! =)
I hope you mentioned to Neil that your company produced the DVD footage for Coraline! That is a strange coincidence!!
Congrats!
From one fangirl to another – that is super cool! 🙂