Accidental Eyeballs

You know what magazines get right, and the Web doesn’t? Serendipity. You pick up a magazine on an airplane or in a doctor’s office, flip through it, and see great stuff you weren’t looking for. While I’m a fan of the social bookmarking sites like Digg, they don’t quite cut it, serendipity-wise.

I can speak with real authority on this—a rare occasion for me. A couple weeks ago, I revived a blog on figures of speech that I hadn’t touched for more than a year. To my surprise, the site has been getting 18,000 unique visitors a month without my doing anything. When I clicked further into the metrics, I discovered that two-thirds of the traffic went to a page with an article I wrote on how to teach a kid to argue. Most of that traffic came from a single source: the social bookmarking site StumbleUpon. Users interested in language had, well, stumbled upon the link to my article and given it a thumbs up—thus increasing its chances of being stumbled upon by like-minded others.

Okay, so the current issue of Southwest Airlines’ Spirit magazine contains a short article that I wrote on “reverse internships.” Why, I asked, should kids get all the learning? Why not hire interns who know stuff I don’t, such as videography or C++ programming? We’ve been getting a ton of mail on the piece, and bloggers are writing about it all over the place. Similarly, an essay I wrote a while back, exploring whether advanced practice nurses should rebrand themselves, caused letters to pour in. Two major medical organizations discussed the story in their annual conferences.

So which is more impressive? The numbers should speak for themselves: my blog gets read by 18,000 people a month. Spirit gets read by 3 million. People learn about my site only if they’ve already shown interest in figures of speech. People reading Spirit encountered my wacky idea, whether or not they had expressed interest in internships. I like to think that a number of these readers didn’t know they were interested until they read the piece.

Serendipity. Any advertiser trying to increase brand recognition should think about it. Even social networking sites preach to the choir. An inflight mag can convert the non-believer.

Posted By: Jay Heinrichs