One of the challenges in online marketing is that everything you do is happening in a vortex of communication and activity.
For example, our company, Common Sense NMS works for Veterans For America and last week, VFA had a very successful week with their messaging on troop deployments and we saw great traffic and activity online. However, that activity happened in conjunction with Bobby Muller from VFA doing a press conference with Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid so it's hard to see exactly the core impact of the work online.
Not so with the word Manufactroversy - quite literally the hottest new word on the Internet and one that Common Sense NMS developed as part of its work pushing back on the movie Expelled.
In fact, the word itself was actually coined by none other than Huffington Post blogger Max Bernstein who is also our Director of Social Networks And Cool New Media Tools (His actual title.)
Manufactroversy was first used here on the Huffington Post exactly one week ago today when Valerie Tarico put up this post. Last Friday, as part of the project, we also launched the Manufactroversy NewsLadder . The NewsLadder is an aggregator tool which captures, with user help, all the articles, posts and videos about the movie and other manufactroversies.
Early last Friday, we googled the word "Manufactroversy" and found there were less than 50 instances of the word online and 100% of them tracked back to the NewsLadder.
What has happened in the last week has been a remarkable example of not only how powerful Google's robot and ability to scour the web has become, but also how the world of communication has evolved in the last twenty four to thirty six months.
Over the past week, the number of links that Google has captured has risen, first to a few hundred, then to a few thousand, especially when James Boyce posted on Monday here on Huffington Post.
As the week progressed, we kept googling our new word and saw the instances of its use skyrocket. By the middle of the week, it had gone over 5,000, yesterday we were over 10,000 and today, there are over 14,000 instances of the word online revealed on a Google search.
Some link to posts we put up, some are reviews of our posts, some are from the Social Network pages we built to support the introduction of the word and the underlying project, disputing the manufactured controversy of Intelligent Design claiming to be science. But all were created in the past week, and all go back to the launch of the word one week ago today.
We knew our efforts were really successful when we started to see our word showing up in other places, "Latest Anti-Obama Manufactroversy is DOA" -- this made me realize what a remarkable time we live in.
Imagine just a few years ago what it would have taken to introduce a word, not only the time and money required but you would have had to work through traditional media sources.
Now, there are great sites like this one, over 60 million blogs, aggregating tools like NewsLadders, and social networks - www.myspace.com/manufactroversy has almost 1,000 members in a week.
Every day, we are seeing how these tools and networks, platforms and applications are changing our world, and the proof is in the growing power of one made-up word: manufactroversy.