Pek Pongpaet

I tend to share a lot of links and articles on Twitter and Facebook for my friends and followers. I’m always curious as to what types of content resonates with my readers. What I usually do is pipe all my shared content through bit.ly which is a URL shortening service that provides analytics. That’s good because if you want to see what your readers gravitate towards you can find out and give them more of what they want.

What I decided to do is to look at the click data for the last 3 weeks of my sharing and see what received the most clicks. Since I post the headlines with the link, a more catchier headline probably fared better on its own merit rather than the actual content.

Clicks    Article
102    Spectacular Photo Manipulations | Inspiration
70    How Entrepreneurs Have Changed – YourAM Blog
60    The REAL ‘Stuff White People Like’ « OkTrends
58    Why We Don’t Need More Women In Tech… Yet «
58    On the Edge – I am Jason Fried. I say amazing and thoughtfu…
56    9 Websites Stuck in the 1990’s / Flowtown (@flowtown)
55    MySQL Diehard vs. NoSQL Fanboi: The Animated Movie – ReadWr..
50    After $75,000, Money Can’t Buy Day-to-Day Happiness
47    What People Earn How We’re Making It Work | Parade.com

What I was surprised to see is that how many of the entrepreneurial and startup  stuff got clicks. Although many of my readers are entrepreneurs, most are not. I also have about 2000 friends on Twitter and Facebook give or take so the click through rate is only about 2.5-5% for most popular stuff. Of course with the Twitter stream and Facebook updates, things get lost in the shuffle. They are very time sensitive and people may or may not see your posts. Another thing to consider is what times your readers are online.

Popularity: 4% [?]

With the advent of Twitter where posts are 140 characters or less and Tumblr and Posterous where blog posts are getting shorter and shorter, it is no surprise that a site like ShoutWorthy exists. ShoutWorthy is another online reputation site that lets you recommend people and receive recommendations in 140 characters or less. It even integrates with Twitter or Facebook so you don’t have to sign up with another login and password.

LinkedIn is great for recommendations but because of privacy settings and the fact that you might not be connected to the person, it may not be possible to view those recommendations. My friend Sachin Agarwal once commented that the problem with LinkedIn recommendations was that after the first few recommendations, everything else was just noise. Having 20+ recommendations is great only from a numbers perspective but nobody was going to sit and read all 20 of them if they were 300 words or more.

ShoutWorthy does away with that Twitter style – everything is short and public. Here’s a screencap of a recommendation I made for my friend Paul Saini.

The setup is pretty much like Twitter in that you see feeds of recommendations by your friends. You also have your own ShoutWorthy page people can see recommendations you’ve given as well as ones you have received.

Thanks to Justin Reidy for introducing me to this site.

Popularity: 6% [?]

I am giving away a free Motorola Droid no strings attached. I am not selling anything. You won’t have to sign up for magazine subscriptions or any memberships you don’t need. Just follow the instructions below to be entered to win this free Motorola Droid. Contest starts Monday February 22 9AM CST and ends February 23 9AM CST.

What do I have to do?

Two things:

1. Follow me on Twitter @pekpongpaet
2. Tweet this link and include the hashtag #freedroidpek

Tweet this! Follow @pekpongpaet

You can tweet this link as many times as you like. Each tweet will be eligible and a winner chosen at random using an algorithm. Please don’t use a bot to autogenerate tons of tweets and spam your followers.

Why are you doing this?

Short answer, I got this Droid for free. I value meeting interesting people on the internet and thought what better way than to give something away for free. I also value being able to reach and connect with more people more than I value the amount of money I would have gotten from selling this phone on ebay.

Where did you get this phone?

I went to a Google Android Hackathon in Chicago. I was given a free Droid there by Google.

Rules

1. This contest is open to anyone with a Twitter account who is at least 18 years of age.
2. This contest is open to US residents in North America only since this Verizon Droid wouldn’t make much sense anywhere else. You can still tweet this link, I would appreciate that.
3. Contest is 1 day only. Winner will be chosen at random after the 24 hours at my convenience. I will tweet out the winner as well as make an announcement on my blog.
4. In order to be eligible, the contestant must have tweeted the link and hashtag and must be following my twitter account @pekpongpaet at the time of the drawing. The contestant is free to unfollow the account once the contest is over.
5. To enter in this contest, you must use your own Twitter account. Any twitter account that looks like a spam account (based on your tweets) will not be considered.
6. Motorola Droid phone will be given as is. It’s brand new in perfect working condition. I will not be liable or responsible for issues or problems you may have with the phone.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Here’s a modified version of the presentation I gave at SocialDevCamp Chicago on Nov 7.

Popularity: 1% [?]

This evening I gave a talk for the Chicago Interactive Designers and Developers Meetup. I’ve been so busy lately that I did not think to promote it well in advance. As a result I didn’t get the word out about it until late in the afternoon today.

With tools like Twitter search and bit.ly, I was able to track all the chatter leading up to it and as well as during the talk. I was so excited to see all this data that I felt like I had to share this experience for people who doubt the utility of Twitter.

3:00PM – I send out my first Tweet about my talk. Mind you my talk is at 6PM. A few moments later I send out another Tweet about it.

In about 2 hours, I count 10 tweets regarding the event, using a quick search for my name or the talk. I also track the amount of times that people click on the link to the talk page. By 5PM there are over 50 clicks to the page. At this point I’m pretty giddy. I’m no David Armano or Frank Ze so 10 tweets and 50 click-throughs is huge.

I wanted to see if people would tweet about the talk during the talk or afterwards. This was what I did to foster that. Once the talk begins I start off by telling people to use the hash tag #chiixdd (for Chicago Interactive Designers & Developers). Judi the organizer also tells people to use #cidd. On the front page of my presentation I also give my Twitter username.

A quick search on my name right after the talk yielded this – around 13 tweets.

Digging a little deeper I found other mentions:

What’s cool is Roundarch (the company that puts food on the table for me) got mentioned and so did Merapi, the Flash Java Bridge created by by Adam Flater, another Roundarcher.

Another interesting measure is to look at the number of followers that each person who tweeted your message has. Essentially that is the number of people who heard your message. I counted up all followers and it came to 4314. So the key in Twitter’s utility is other people spreading your message. If it was just up to me, only 629 people would hear my message but because other people have passed my message along, my reach has increased 4 fold in this instance. And I’m some super no name guy. Imagine if you had 20,000 followers and thousands of people who retweeted your message.

Did I also tell you bit.ly is the bomb? Before if you pasted a link on Twitter, you’d have no way of knowing how many people clicked on that link if it wasn’t your own site. A quick look at the bitly page for the meetup page that I tweeted tells me over 100 people have clicked on the page at the time of this writing.

So for all you Twitter haters or people who think that there is no use to Twitter, think again. In a very short amount of time (3 hrs), a no name speaker such as myself is able to broaden his reach in getting people to know about his talk. About 70 people RSVPed and about 40 people showed up. I’m told that it’s a pretty decent turnout and that the ratio is usually about 50%.

If anyone has great Twitter stories, I’d love to hear them as well.

Popularity: 2% [?]