It has been a fascinating week for me in social media and I am still dizzy with the implications. So, fellow travelers, I pose a question:

• Is it better to be completely dugg, make it to the front page and have more traffic than you can handle?
• Or is it better to make the top of the heap of upcoming stories and get more targeted diggs and traffic?

I recently had occasion to be voted on in the magical world of social media. I created a fun resume, just as an example of creative stimulation, and it went semi-viral.
All Data From Feb. 10th, 2009 - Chart from Feb. 20th, 2009

I received 883 direct hits on the site, including directly to the image of my resume. I am concluding that the majority of this was click-through from several sources, including digg, reddit and twitter.

I received 253 incoming visitors from reddit.com, which is about half the up-votes I received (549) and if you look at the TOTAL votes up or down (622) one could conclude that somehow these aren’t all showing up under my G-analytic account. Or people were only looking at the thumbnail and making pointed comments about my Mother. Even my proper statistics, built into my service, only registered 297 from the specific reddit page. Reddit traffic was more commentary, more critical and more votes. I saw it on the hot page, much to my surprise, so that type of exposure nets a bit more general attention.

Digg traffic (174 diggs) was very specific, as I was in Pics under the arts and culture category. This was not enough for the front page, but who did see it?  Well, the people who did see it were not just front page lookie-lous, they were there either in that catagory or in pics digging. Involved in the process. These were people who would repost it to a tweet, a blog, and other places. Funny, my digg.com / refferal number for incoming visitors for the entire month so far is 13. Even my regular stats say that digg is a search engine and I register an 18 for incoming visits.

The biggest surprise for me was the tweet network, which contributed to several of the unsolicited e-mails I received and was by far the most organic, rendering in sharp relief a strange and beautiful fractal of exposure (60 - 90 unique visitors). A large portion of it in Brazil, I would love to “kick it” in Sao Paulo (94 unique visitors) sometime, so let me know if you have a couch for rent.

There were a few social news aggregators that picked up the various submissions and posted them, but the next biggest linkage was from blogs (85ish), where I received some more fun commentary.

• First a shout out to yet another Michael Anderson, who posted about the resume here. Thanks and back at cha.
• Then the biggest source of individual blog traffic was this gentleman. Of whom I have great respect for both reading the post and taking my “data” with a grain of salt. This is also a source of good and respectful commenting, which I will address later in the post.
• Also, this very nicely designed site and a thoughtful comment.
• And a Russian(I believe) blogger posted it as well.

So, what lessons have I learned?

• Blogs need comment sections, duh.
• All of the feed back in any language was potentially the best objective, 3rd party advice that I have ever received.
• Anyone who is going before such a wide and knowledgeable audience must have a thick skin and be able to not take things too personally.
• I must harden my websites against a Social Tsunami, just in case.
• Humans are tying these networks together with copy&paste faster than the pipes can grow.