Case study: What happens when a social entrepreneur hits the blogosphere (1/4)

Last week, Global X had breakfast with Matt Flannery, founder and President of Kiva, the online microlending venture that recently got a lot of attention in the blogosphere. Krista Van Lewen, Kiva’s PR expert, joined us to talk about what happened during these six weeks on the Internet. And in Africa.

This is a great lesson for all social entrepreneurs, who don’t always know how to control the power of the Internet to help them change the world (read Chip Giller’s comments here).

It all started when Kiva sent a press release on October 12. Traffic (usually 320 visitors per day), started to build up immediately, until it was picked up by a relatively small blog (BubbleGeneration) on October 13. Traffic went up dramatically for a couple of days (to 968), then went back down to 650 visitors, but still at a much higher level than before the press release was issued.

Then, on October 26, DailyKos, one of the most-read blogs in the blogosphere, picked up the news about Kiva. The day after, Kiva reached a peak traffic of 7,261 unique visitors.

Here are the numbers of daily unique visitors, as shown in yellow on the above graph, for the month of October:

• Average for the week of October 1-7: 320
• October 13 (the BubbleGeneration effect): 968
• Average for the week of October 15-21: 650
• October 27 (the DailyKos effect): 7,261
• Average for the October 28-31 period: 3,200

On average 3,200 unique visitors went to Kiva during the last four days of October, a 10x increase over a typical day before Kiva issued their press release.

First lesson for fellow social entrepreneurs: yes, PR works on the Internet – but it works even better with the magic of a product or service that people are looking for, combined with good timing.

But be warned: blogs can get out of control very quickly. Tomorrow, Global X will explain what happened next.


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