As you might recall, last week I posted an entry about some anti-Microsoft Office bus ads
that Sun Microsystems is running on buses that serve Redmond. Cheeky monkeys.
Figuring that the folks at
Boing Boing might appreciate the story, I submitted it to their editors.
Cory Doctorow - whose
"The Rebranding of Billy Bailey" is a hilarious marketing satire/love letter - ran it that night.
From there, the story went to
Digg; and
from Digg, the story went
everywhere. Visitors came in from all over the place, from
our local paper to
the
Netherlands to
Spain to
Brazil. As I'm
writing, I see that the post has gotten almost 30,000 Web views.
Some observations:
- The impact on traffic of Boing Boing is considerable.
- The impact on traffic of Digg, and Digg-like sites around the world, is downright staggering.
- However - stories about this campaign first came out months ago, but caused very few
ripples. It took a mention in Boing Boing to make it cool
enough to Digg.
- Digg-generated traffic leads to religious arguments about software in your
Comments.
- Even though this was a VERY limited
print campaign, the associated Internet buzz put those ads in front of tens of thousands of
people worldwide. Sun didn't have to pay a nickel extra for that exposure. In this, I was
but a pawn in Sun's diabolical game.
- No one seems to think that these ads would lead anyone to download OpenOffice who hadn't
heard of it before, much less pay for it with a donation. However, a sizeable number of
people seem to think that's beside the point.
- Our visitors rarely clicked out of my post to view the rest of the site, or any other posts. They read what lay at the other end of the link, then moved on.
- Only one person - an staff member at a news portal - asked permission to use my photos on
their own site. (I'm not griping, just noting with interest.)
- Only one blogger, as far as I can tell, identified the photos as coming from my Flickr account. (Now, if I had blogged those photos from Flickr, they would have been available for anyone to use under that service's terms and conditions, which require a link to the original location. I suspect the results would have been the same.)
- Microsoft developers have other things to do than argue with open source advocates.
- I'm getting spam e-mail in Hebrew all of a sudden.
Tags: Microsoft, OpenOffice, OpenOffice.org, Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow, Digg, Sun Microsystems, word of mouth, blogging, Flickr