Concept: Spreading critical news viral-ly

Last week I had one of the “best” traffic days on my blog. Google Analytics shows a nice little blip:

First, my blog is not one of those places where I get huge amounts of visitors (maybe someday but these things take time). I try to post things that are relevant and timely, interestingly, it seems like some of my most popular pages are ones where I offer “help” of some sort. Two really popular pages are about correcting a Windows Vista update error (80245003) and fixing a Honda Odyssey sliding door issue.

However, my last post was a bit different in nature. It was to be more of a critical warning to users. The challenge was, how to get the news out quickly since the larger institutions frequently take time to get notifications out and systems updated. When I first became aware of this IRS scam/virus, there was little or no information about it on the search engines, news sites, security sites, blogs, etc. So I was thinking, how do you “break the news” and get the information out to the world? Well now with social sites and social networking, there are plenty of ways to jump start the process. Here is the process that I used and some ideas for how to improve on it in the future (should the need arise):

1. Write a time-sensitive blog post after ensuring that it is critical and timely
2. Make sure you have the appropriate Meta Tags, Keywords, search phrases set for your post so that Search Engines can pick it up easily (usually takes a day for things to get spidered and indexed…sometimes faster)
3. Have yor social networking site tools configured on your blog/site: DIGG, del.icio.us, Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc.
4. Ensured that pings go out to all of the RSS/Feed sites (this is a config within WordPress)
5. Spread the news to friends/family/coworkers (via Email or Instant Messenger) with links to the post and instructions on what to do (e.g., DIGG, post/give feedback on StumbleUpon, etc.)
6. Have some people use the “social networking tools”:
   • DIGG the post (some of the DIGGS on my previous post were from people I knew, others not…I did feel weird about Digging it myself though…)
   • Bookmark on del.icio.us
   • Get it on StumbleUpon and have people rank it
   • Get others to link on other blogs (Technorati is good for quick keyword searching)
   • Post info on Twitter (quickly gets your tweets out or your network)
   • Do keyword searches on Ligit.com to build up the keyword cloud presence
7. Respond to comments posted on the Blog both on the blog and individually – send people who comment a personal email asking them to spread the work using the tools/channels above
8. When other technology or news sites start picking up a story, contact them or editors directly.
9. Post on other blogs that may have similar items, with trackbacks to your own post
10. Stay on top of feedback and commentary and react as appropriate

Those are just some ideas that I came up with. I employed some of them (not all) as I tried to propagate the information out about the IRS virus/scam. It did bump my infinitesimal presence on the web a tiny bit higher.

I would love to hear how other people get news out quickly to the online community. What methods are tried and true, work or don’t work? The WWW is huge so getting your info to bubble to the surface is a fun and interesting challenge. Maybe next time, I will do it even better!