Thought Leaders and Centers of Influence

I released a new article on Monday called Playing Nice with the Other CSS Kids. As always, I've been watching its progress around the internet community very closely. Having done this a few times now I've noticed a very distinct pattern to the spread emerging.

Once the article was up on Content with Style I emailed a few people: css-d, 456 Berea Street, CSS Beauty, CSS Vault and a few others. No spamming, just a few personal emails to folk I genuinely thought would be interested in the subject. As it turns out, most of them were interested. Both Roger Johanssen and Alex Giron linked it up immediately and that's when the fun started.

I kept an eye on the log files over the following couple of days... ALL the links in the first day were from CSS Beauty and 456 Berea Street, and that really is a testament to the following those sites have earned themselves. Even though the article only got linked from the side notes of each, the traffic was phenominal. Off the back of those two links Playing Nice with the Other CSS Kids made it onto the del.icio.us Most Popular list, which, as I've seen before, proved to be the tipping point.

From the moment the article made that list, the traffic shifted. The Most Popular list feeds on itself - the higher up the list you are the more people see your article and the more people bookmark it. And on and on.

Over the last day the traffic has calmed down and the inbound traffic has diffused - now coming from personal blogs and forums. Some of these sites are far less subject-specific than the original sources.

This is only a very small example but it illustrates perfectly the idea of 'thought leaders' and 'points of infulence'. PR and marketing people will already be well aware of this concept but though I have come across the idea many times I'd never really thought about it in a practical way.

This feels like a real democratisation of information to me. If your content is useful and/or interesting then it can gather a large audience very quickly with a little help from these 'thought leaders'.

I'm told that this is how many Sun press releases are put out these days. The head of communications sends out an email to a handful of journalist acquanitances and if they are interested, they spread the word.

Communications departments should be paying attention...

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