Politics

Tools for Transparency: The Power of Aggregation

By Scott Stadum

Last week my dad snapped this great photo of a Giant Silk Moth resting in his southwest Ohio backyard -

I was immediately struck by they photo and thought it would be fun to share beyond our family email exchanges.  So, I uploaded the pic to imgur.com, titled it something I knew would work with the Reddit.com community and submitted it.

By the end of that day, the submission had received 133 upvotes and 70 downvotes. Looking at those numbers, you might think the photo was mildly popular on Reddit, receiving light traffic and sporadic comments like “Kill it with fire!”

Now if you look look at the imgur.com numbers, the story is slightly different.  At the end of that first day, the photo had received 14,450 views and as of this blog post, over 25,00o views.

So what’s my point? Aggregation services like Reddit, Digg, Stumbleupon and Delicious have the potential to drive large amounts of traffic to your posts, to engage users beyond your traditional demographics and to help build brand awareness.

Of course not all of your links will be successful traffic drivers, and in this case my dad’s brand is still about the same, but it’s useful to keep in mind that you won’t know if you aren’t submitting.  Try, learn, adapt, repeat.

Full post as published by Sunlight Foundation on July 22, 2010 (boomark / email).