This guest post is by Tom Meitner of The Practical Nerd.
The other night, I found out author/marketer Chris Brogan was in town. I am a big fan of his and his book Trust Agents, so I wanted to go meet him. I'm not going to go through all of the details of the tweet exchange—you can read about how I wound up not meeting him after all on my blog.
Photo by Aidan Jones, licensed under Creative Commons
However, as a result of trying to meet him, I had a conversation with him via Twitter. So, I wrote up a post about what I learned from not meeting him, and I put his name in the title when I tweeted it out to my followers. Chris was notified, and he retweeted it to his followers, with the tag, "Very nice story."
That doesn't sound that interesting, does it? I mean, Chris doesn't know me, has really never met me, and it was one tweet. But by putting his stamp of approval on it, Chris was publicly inviting people to read my article—and he has over 177,000 followers. In a matter of minutes, I had an influx of traffic (see the screenshot below). These are by no means numbers to write home about, but when you average 50-60 visitors a day, 185 sure is a big jump—especially in the span of a couple of hours!
The "Brogan Effect"—An hourly breakdown of traffic that day
It never would have happened if I had decided to go meet Chris but didn't tell him about it. I had to break the ice with him first and give it a shot. Through that, I got on his radar, and that's how my post was tweeted out to his followers.
It also taught me a few very important lessons about networking:
- Don't be afraid to introduce yourself to the big dogs. Chris Brogan, in the small interaction I've had with him, seems to be a pretty genuinely nice guy, and my post only brought more people who told me the same thing about him. Twitter has such a low barrier to entry that it gives you the...
