“Now, I’m Going to Kill You.”
Redfin is one of Time Magazine’s “50 Best Websites of 2007.” We woke up yesterday morning feeling historic, as if we had suddenly become a statesman, a perky Olympic athlete, a consumer craze, a major health trend. We looked for a Time Magazine logo to embed in the page and found this delightful graphic instead:
Jim Lamb, ace Stanford marketing intern, math super-puzzler, ex-football star, prodigious sushi eater, home-sick Seattleite, crunched the numbers on how being in Time affected our traffic:
Thought I’d share a little bit of [Google] Analytics data regarding the Time.com story that came out yesterday. The data is pretty rough but it gives us a better idea of the impact of appearing in an article like that. As of a few hours ago, about 750 people had linked directly from the article to our homepage. Traffic numbers from yesterday suggest that perhaps a few hundred more typed “redfin.com” into their browsers after seeing us in the article. A few other stats on these visitors:
–> about a third were from WA/CA/MA
—> majority checked out the homepage and then left, especially those in other regions (non WA/CA/MA)
—> over 90% had never been to our site before
–> 1 in 10 viewed a property details page
–> 1 in 20 visited the Buy silo
Doesn’t seem like it will be driving us any immediate business, but the article was pretty nice for general exposure/branding purposes which we can’t really measure. It made it to digg.com front page twice (1,750 total diggs) which typically means a ton of pageviews.
We also have a few bonus links for you, the first an obituary for the great-great-grandson of Prince Otto von Bismarck:
Count Gottfried von Bismarck, who was found dead on Monday aged 44, was a louche German aristocrat with a multi-faceted history as a pleasure-seeking heroin addict, hell-raising alcoholic, flamboyant waster and a reckless and extravagant host of homosexual orgies.
Meanwhile, the New York Times describes a 1985 fight between Yankees’ manager Billy Martin and hillbilly pitcher Eddie Lee Whitson; the fight started in a bar, spilled out onto the street and ended, humiliatingly, in a hotel corridor: Whitson, who was tall and sturdy, kicked Martin squarely in the groin, a blow that made everyone watching wince. Martin crumpled for a second, but then stood up and in a calm, but firm, voice said, “Now, I’m going to kill you.”
Whitson then broke Martin’s arm, an injury that Martin told reporters was the result of a bowling accident.
Both links are from a Friend of Redfin.
Janelle said:
So to get this Forums thing started, we had a few meetings here at the Redfin headquarters.
The first major meeting included:
Bahn – marketing manager and brains behind the original idea of Redfin
Cynthia – our charismatic marketing rock star
Matt – web/tech guru extraordinaire
Bryan – something big time with the tech stuff and God of all computer issues
Dave – broker/attorney wiz bang and my boss
Glenn – our fearless yet Zen-like leader and CEO
Me – I mean, how in the world did I end up here?
I was a nervous wreck. My palms were sweating. (I don’t know why I can’t take these intimate meetings in better stride, but I just can’t. At our company wide meetings I’m a Chatty Cathy. I interview well. I’m a dynamo at most parties. But this meeting thing? Fugettaboutit.)
If the rest of the meeting attendees gave me a thought, they must have been thinking, “Why does she look like a deer about to be hit by a Mack truck?” I put my foot in my mouth about one of our emerging markets, and mentally prayed for the whole shabang to end, which it finally did.
Don’t get me wrong – I worked hard to join Redfin and am one of its most rah-rah employees. I have a knack for the written word, and campaigned for the position when the job was posted. But, here I was in a meeting with the big wigs of the company. Sure, I crack jokes and have coffee with them in our teeny tiny kitchen, but to be part of an official policy founding meeting with these people? I felt like Forrest Gump getting a purple heart from Kennedy.
Our forums are off to a decent start, the dialogue exchange has been intelligent, light-hearted and informative. Since the big first day, we’ve had more meetings and I’ve gotten through them fine. I suppose the first one just needed to be gotten through. I even got a personal high five from Glenn, which I played ultra cool, but made me scream inside like a Beatles groupie from the Ed Sullivan show.
Bottom line, I am the geeky-est of geeks. I am Geeky McGeekerson from Geekertown on the Geekiest day of the year. (Thank you David Schmader).
July 13, 2007 4:24 PM