The other day, a comment thread on CommonHealth totally lit up. CommonHealth blogger Carey Goldberg had posted a quick breaking-news item announcing the recall of several batches of the popular baby formula Similac. Carey wisely included a link and a phone number for parents to check whether they had one of the contaminated products. But as you might expect, the Similac site and the recall hotline were quickly deluged, and hundreds of freaked-out parents had no way to tell if their formula was affected.
So they took to the CommonHealth comments. Carey’s quick post became a phenom. It quickly garnered tens of thousands of views and more than 200 responses, with many parents posting lot numbers for the affected batches of Similac.
And then, just as quickly as they arrived, the rush of visitors was gone. Poring over the logs after the initial rush of traffic, it seems as though most of the visitors came from Google News, which must have flagged the post high up in its cluster of stories about the recall.
This is what I call “one-night-stand traffic” – intoxicating yet unsatisfying, over almost as soon as it begins. You can get hooked on that sudden rush, and many news sites do, tailoring their content to appeal to the Diggs and Drudges of the Web. But for a network of sites that are all about fostering engagement, what can we take away from these episodes? Continue reading