Unintentional experiment

So, I was looking for a new dentist because my former dentist is not on a bus line and too far to walk. I twittered the request and then posted here in my blog. Then, the blog post got pulled into facebook as a note. Sample sizes are small, but….

twitter.com/dunrie – 33 followers – 1 recommendation
facebook – 57 friends – 1 recommendation
pownce – 15 friends – 1 recommendation
this blog – 8 17 subscribers – 3 recommendations (note: subscriber number from FeedSmith plugin, was collecting subscribers a week ago and didn’t have the full set, 17 number as of 9/9/2007)

First, thanks to all who recommended someone!

Second, I have to admit I was surprised by the numbers. Sure, it is a teeny sample size, but I would have predicted that twitter would have the most reach and return the most dentists. I would have thought that the facebook version of my blog would have had more reach than the blog itself. I expected that my blog would have the least reach.

So I have two hypotheses for why.

The blog may have lower reach but it is less transitory than a tweet or even itself fed into facebook as a note. Perhaps the sheer volume of other distractions on those media mean that my question only had a brief window to be read and acted upon, and that window of attention is longer with the blog.
The tweets, facebook items, and pownce items go to the same network, and the blog has the least similar audience (guessing here, I don’t actually know). Supporting evidence: the blog comments included someone I had known in grad school but wasn’t in my current “network” on the other services.

Anyone got a better idea?

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Blogs pick up a bunch of search engine traffic, so it’s possible that you are getting dentist recommendations from people who were searching for something and happened to stumble on what you wrote.

It’s often the case that more people are regular readers of a blog than are measured by “subscriber” numbers – are you running your feed through Feedburner? – and thus you’re undercounting the reach of the blog posting.

Some folks are reading the blog in Facebook but then commenting directly on the blog maybe? That’s what I did for this post.

Brian Kerr has done some work on conversion funnel analysis for community media – where you are counting things like a blog comment or a wiki edit as success.

Comment by Edward Vielmetti — September 1, 2007 @ 5:20 pm

Yes, I just added the FeedSmith FeedBurner plugin. That’s where the “8 subscribers” data comes from.

I bet at least a few of that 8 are me having syndicated my own blog (via facebook and via jaiku), so the number of actual humans other than me subscribed is even lower than 8!

I know that I have at least a couple more readers than subscribers. My familly thus far have been the main folks commenting on my posts, and I don’t envision any of them having subscribed via RSS. My family, tho, aren’t local enough to have chimed in on the dentist survey, and I don’t think they’re “always tuned in” the way a subscriber is.

I’ll bet you’re right, that any response is a conversion and that the medium of the response (facebook, twitter, pownce, blog) may not be the same as the medium that got the responder’s attention. Funny!

Comment by Dunrie — September 2, 2007 @ 9:43 am

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