Seems like everybody wants to produce content that goes viral. Speaking from experience, you should be careful about what you wish for!
Last week I followed with tradition and posted something light and entertaining on a Friday. In fact I thought it was funny — skewering Guy Kawasaki for his voluminous and sometimes bizarre tweets.
To my surprise and delight, Guy actually found the post and had a great sense of humor about it. And it must have created some traction for him — his team tweeted it out five times over 24 hours. This is a fellow with nearly 300,000 followers.
The post didn’t set a record for an individual day on my blog, but over three days, it was pretty huge — about 5X the normal rate of page views for a weekend. By some definitions, I guess you could say it went viral.
And then the problems started.
When you go viral, you reach a lot of new people outside the comfortable “normal” audience you’ve built over time. In fact about 95% of the readers last weekend had never been to the blog before. This was also a new population who didn’t realize I was trying to be funny. People who don’t even know what funny IS. So I started getting nasty-grams from folks who thought I was being profane: “Who are you to call somebody a devil? You need to look in the mirror, pick up a Bible and ask this man for forgiveness.” How do you respond to that?
Next came the imposter. Somebody logged into the comment section with a Guy Kawasaki email address and hijacked the blog. Then the “real” Guy showed up to defend himself … or was it a representative? … or another imposter? … and for awhile I didn’t know which end was up. It took me about an hour to sort through the mess, delete the imposter’s comments, and “stand watch” over new comments coming in. Up until that day I had only deleted one comment in the history of the blog.
Since I made the choice to not have ads on this site, I don’t receive any financial benefit from thousands of new readers coming to the blog. What about new RSS subscriptions? As best as I can tell, it was about ZERO. They were all blog tourists I suppose.
I’m really grateful that Guy took my post in good humor and liked it enough to tweet it out. From the imposter incident, I have a new appreciation that being a celebrity comes with a target on your back. In the end, I’ll settle for my good ol’ {grow} homeys any day!
I really appreciate the consistent friendship and support from the {grow} community, whether I suck or whether I knock it out of the park. I don’t need viral. I just need you. Thanks!
