What I didn’t expect were the stats. I want to share my findings with you:

The arrow marked “twitter post” shows the final day’s tally for the day I ran that post. The second arrow that’s marked “expert post” is actually a bit of a misnomer, because the stats show both the Twitter post *and* the expert post helping drive my traffic. What’s just crazy is the third arrow labeled “so far.”

For whatever reason, my stats package thinks the new day starts at about 10PM ET. I get a new graph every day at that time. I took that snapshot at Midnight ET of the day the expert post ran. That means I’m going to have one of my best blog traffic days ever on Saturday the 8th of August, and for what? A couple of silly posts?

Here’s the breakdown of the traffic on the day of the Twitter post:

And here’s the breakdown of traffic so far of the “so far” day:

What Does This All Mean?

Near as I can tell, it means that writing absurd pieces that mock or mirror the current status quo of things we’re passionate about like Twitter and Social Media can get some attention. But I think there’s more to it. Because people don’t expect snarky, sarcastic blog posts from me (or do you?), I think my efforts had even more impact. What’s your take on that?

Oh, I meant to tell you, on the day that I got the huge push against the Twitter post, LOTS of that traffic walked in the front door instead of clicking in from any discernible source:

So that means it wasn’t even pulled in via Twitter, but by sources either not tracked, or by people just typing in my URL.

Beyond this, I’m as stumped as you. I feel crazy and yet curious. There’s something to this little case study in the absurd. But what?

If that’s true, and I believe it is, we have to really think about how we share, how we make our requests, and about what Dr. Stephen R. Covey called the “emotional bank account?” How can we share information beyond the first person? Let’s talk about the hand-carried letter.

The Hand-Carried Letter

In some ways, as we’ve shifted to this ubiquitous distribution world, where I can be a video maker, a radio host, a newspaper, a book, and a public speaker all from my couch, something else shifted as well. In a world where everyone can distribute information, that means there’s lots more information. That means data at Jackson Pollock velocity. Too much too read means much more goes unread.

We need “the hand-carried letter.”

A hand-carried letter means to me that the person choosing to share information with me believes in what she is sharing, and believes that it’s something I want to know about.

Think about the mail in your inbox (or clogging your social channels). Think about the mail you’re sending. Can you say this about the information you’re choosing to share?

Sharing and The Tax on Friendship

As time passes, we rely on our friends to vet and share information. Let’s use “friends” to include business colleagues, online personalities we’ve come to trust (me?), and others who we believe to have a handle on things. We look to these people for information that has already been considered once.

Example: I learn about the real time web from Louis Gray. I don’t even bother reading about it from other sources any more. When PR people send me info that seems like something Louis will cover, I either tell them to see Louis, or I delete and wait for Louis to cover it.

Example: I learn about interesting, thought-provoking books from Whitney Hoffman and Ann and Michael. I might or might not get other sources for this, but I trust the hand-carried letter of what Whitney and Ann and Michael are sharing.

But what about when people need something to travel far? Lots of us seem to have causes and needs and businesses to promote online. We have things we think are important, but sharing this information and spreading it requires that we find people who think it’s interesting enough to hand-carry to their audiences, their communities, their constituent masses.

Asking our friends to share things is a tax. If every person alive has what Dr. Stephen R. Covey calls an “emotional bank account” between us, this asking requires a small withdrawal. If things are going well between two people, and/or if the “ask” isn’t too big, this tax is small. But what if someone starts asking you to share every little thing all the time? Or, what if the person asking doesn’t really have much stored up in the emotional bank account between you? Just because you *can* reach me via email or Twitter doesn’t mean I support your causes. Right? How does your multiple asking tax those loosely-joined friendships? It taxes them at a much higher rate, is the answer.

It adds up quickly.

Ensuring Prompt Delivery

Thus, in this environment, we have to do several things, if we’re to rely on friends and loosely-joined connections to deliver hand-carried letters for us.

• Give much more frequently than you ask. This gives others a better feeling about who you are and what you do for the space at large.
• Share without being asked, when you consider information good. This builds up points in one’s emotional bank account (we talk about this in our pending book, Trust Agents, by the way).
• Make the requests simple, infrequent, and brief. (If you make it hard for me to share, why should I?)
• Ask only when you need it most. Asking others to share every little thing taxes the relationship.
• Don’t seek hand-carried letter service if you’re really intending a mass-mail message.
• Build your information such that it’s “hand-carried” friendly (brief, portable, shareable, addressable (with a URL).
• Thank people for sharing, as often as you can.

What’s Your Take?

Does this resonate? How do you see the information sharing world changing? What does this mean for you or your business?

Photo Credit the consumerist

Now, mash this with my thoughts about the annotated world, and what I’m thinking about with Brightkite. Are we on the way to a borderless world? This is data in a post media world, but also in a post-web world.

Throw in a taste of Dave Winer’s “commercial information” idea:

A commenter named Hartsock put it perfectly: “I look forward to the day when I can search like this: “pants waist:38in inseam:32in cargo” and find a listing of cargo pants that fit me and places I can go and buy them.” Permalink to this paragraph

However this is not advertising! It is commercial information. The former is in our way, the latter is what we seek.

That adds even more ways to think about all this.

It’s a lot to think about.

Your ideas?

I’ve recently started using BrightKite again, specifically because of the iPhone application. The application is reasonably simple: map your GPS coordinates to a specific location and then allow you to annotate that area with text or a photo. So, I can be visiting a place like St. Petersburg, Florida, and I can check in. I might take a snap of the hotel where I’m staying, and I might add a note like “the coffee here is horrible, but there’s a Dunkin Donuts a few blocks west.”

Someone else in the area who is using the same application might now see this update and realize two things (depending on my privacy settings): 1.) I’m nearby. 2.) That the coffee at the hotel stinks. In both cases, this information is only available through the use of this software.

But it’s like glyphs. There’s a whole sense of meta information that is passing between people that you might not know is there. (William Gibson covers this beautifully in the not-science-fiction book, Spook Country.)

How Does This Impact You?

Services like Twitter and FriendFeed and Flickr and Facebook and LinkedIn and more are hosting conversations around you that might be of value to you. You can’t always tune in, but if you don’t even opt to build a PORTAL into these areas so that you can learn what’s being said, you’re missing out on information that might add to your business needs.

If you’re not using services like Yelp and BrightKite, (and you could name several others), you’re missing some of the glyphs and warnings we’re leaving on the landscape to tell you about the way things are versus the way things are marketed. You’re missing chance encounters. You’re missing stray opportunities.

Again, you don’t have to get involved. It’s just that we are, and we’re passing many more notes than you can imagine.

Participating in the Annotated World

There are many projects here. There are many ways to add to this body of work. If you think about it, we are helping a web of human information exist and think. We are directing warm information to where it’s needed when it’s needed without a core leader. It’s quite a project, if you think about it.

Here are some ways to feed the network:

• When you’re somewhere new, snap photos and post them to Flickr.
• Take photos of people at events and post the good ones. Add their names and companies to them.
• When you post photos in Flickr, when you can, add contextual information about where.
• Write reviews for places and services in Yelp.
• Use Twitter at conferences.
• Add hash tags to events. (We used #nms08 at the New Marketing Summit. It just means type #SOMETHING at some point in your twitter post for tracking purposes.)
• Add hash tags to specific presentations if you think Twitter will enhance it.
• Provide information about places. I tweet traffic jams.
• Build human networks to feed information through. Find people who share like interests. (There are 40 groups listed on Facebook for “cartographers.”)
• Participate in wikis and shared information building projects. The rewards of such projects are better community. (Look at what Colin Browning has started at Constructing Social as a tool for mapping social media resources, for instance.)
• Share the good stuff. When you see great blog posts, tweet about them, reblog them, pop them up into Delicious and StumbleUpon so that people might see them and benefit from them later. For instance, I’m collecting social media case studies. I’d love more of those. When you find them, and if you use Delicious. just add a tag that says: for:chrisbrogan , with the colon in there. Pow. It lands in my box and I can add it to the file.

There are conversations – rich dialogues and information sharing experiences – happening with or without you. Several of them have business value. Many can impact your life. Get in the habit of using Twitter Search to find out about places and events and people before you visit. You’d be amazed what you turn up.

Is this making sense? Do you get where I’m coming from? Are you already participating? Or does this scare the poo out of you to consider?

This is related but not. It’s a fascinating book worth checking out of your library:

Thanks for your thoughts. Trust agents are attuned to these glyphs. I just want to share the premise out further.

Photo credit, CosmoPolitician

What do YOU think?

Hat tip to Pamela Rosenthal, a Boston area community specialist you should get to know.