The Power of Social Networking

Would you like to achieve overnight fame? The fastest way is through social networking. Although I use the word "fame" very loosely in this context, as nobody from a major publishing company is beating on my door (yet).

As many of you may already know, I write for an online travel magazine, Examiner.com as the Portland Motorcycle Travel Examiner. I have been doing this for the entire summer and have been pushing my articles on Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. Although this has helped to drive my page views up a bit as people reposted my links, I just wasn't hitting the numbers that I would like to have seen. Part of the problem with using those sites is that no matter how good of a friend you are of mine, if motorcycles don't interest you, you are not going to be all that motivated to go check out a long list of articles dedicated to that subject.

Last month, I finally forced myself to go to the Corvallis bike night, put on by members of the Pacific Northwest Riders. I say forced, because when I would make plans to go, something else would come up and I would have to cancel. Through meeting the people at that event, I decided to start participating on the forums.

Last night I posted a new aricle on my page. I went to the forum and started a new thread talking just about me! Well, actually to talk about my article and introduce myself to the rest of the PNWRiders.

This morning I checked my page views and at 6am, I had already received 62 page views! I followed that up with a quick Twitter search, and when using the keywords "motorcycle travel," the first four tweets that came up were links to my post on the PNWRiders forum. Checking the profiles, I discovered that one was from Manchester, England, one was from Canada! The other two did not have listings of where they were from.

What a great feeling it is to know that people so far away are reading my material as well. Although it was the forum, a social networking site of it's own, that got me this amount of distribution, it was actually meeting people with a common interest that started me down this path. Remember that although our lives may center around Facebook now, it is still important to get out and meet real people. A great big thank you to the readers on the PNWRiders forum.