Workspace: Finding the Value of a Viral Communication Strategy after Stolen Computers

Workspace is a really cool shared space / co-working environment in Vancouver’s Gastown. 2 weeks ago, Workspace had their first year anniversary party. Unfortunately, thieves broke into Workspace before the party and stole the iMac front-desk computer and laptops. Bill MacEwen, the owner of Workspace, was able to retrieve a photo of one of the suspected thieves after one of them uploaded a picture of himself accidentally. After the incident, the Vancouver blogging community decided to help on the rescue effort to find the thief but more importantly Workspace’s computers.

This is the guy who purchased one of the stolen computers and uploaded his picture accidentally. We all thought he was the thief but apparently not. Poor guy, he has his face all over the Internet by now.

As a result of all this blogging activity, hundreds of accrued incoming links fuelled the blogosphere. According to Bill MacEwen and Technorati, prior to the incident, Workspace had between 100 and 200 incoming links. It’s now showing 446. Consequently, Workspace has seen a 300% increase in visitors and page views to the site during the month of September. That’s a sudden, impressive growth, which usually takes years to achieve organically. In the last few days, my friends Travis Smith from Hopstudios.com and Boris Mann from bmannconsulting.com then ask me THE question: what is the value of all this sudden blogging activity & accrued visitors to Workspace’s site?

That’s a tough question but I will make an attempt at finding a figure for you. Of course, it is not the just the sheer amount of links that matters here but the amount of traffic to the site and finally the requests for new business for Workspace as a result of all this. If we only take the amount of accrued visitors into account in this scenario along with an estimated value of each visitor at $0.30, which is a realistic CPC (cost per click) average, we come up with a total traffic value of $2,250.90. Just to clarify, if Workspace would have had to pay to get this accrued traffic to their site, especially within that time frame, through any available paid options, such as Pay per Click (PPC) Advertising, it would have cost them at least $2,250.90, net of PPC Management fee. PPC Management fee in this case could have easily been evaluated at $1,000, in time and effort. Therefore, it is with a reasonable level of confidence that we can evaluate Workspace’s viral communication campaign worth $3,251.

Here is below the traffic over time and the sudden increase in September 2007. We usually create these spikes through PPC Advertising. It is quite unusual to see spikes like these through organic traffic, especially within that time period.

Finally, since a lot more people in Vancouver know Workspace and its shared workspace service, this unfortunate event is now turning into a noticeable PR campaign. This in itself has a lot of intrinsic value and long term branding effect which is hard to quantify objectively. Time will tell if the generosity offered by local bloggers will overcome the loss that Workspace has suffered. I can easily speculate that we have not found the end of this story yet and there is more to come back to Workspace then hot computers.

Permalink /// Comments (4)

Comments

1. less than i thought, but amazing nonetheless!
   thx alex.

   Posted by kk+ on 10/09 at 10:03 AM

2. I thought that it will be much more than that but it’s ok like this too.

   Posted by link building on 03/11 at 05:50 AM

3. Blue on graphics - PPC, Green is organic?

   Posted by Steave on 06/25 at 12:28 AM

4. It is pretty shocking to hear about the stolen computers. Thanks for sharing this useful information like this. Hope people will find it fruitful.

   Posted by content management system on 09/07 at 11:21 PM