Recently we’ve had some favorable “social mentions” and been surprised about the immediate impact of such mentions and thought we’d present the metrics of 3 of these social mentions (SMs).

The first SM was on April 11 when David Bollier, a prominent commentator and author on commons issues posted 1,545 words on his “News and Perspectives on the Commons” blog about our initiative, ending with the following wringing endorsement,

The fate of the city-TLDs, in New York and elsewhere, is still unfolding, so the vision set forth by Connecting.NYC could still materialize. But it will take some concerted advocacy, organizing and public agitation. We need to keep in mind that opportunities of this magnitude to re-imagine the future of a city, build an empowering civic infrastructure (the TLDs) and establish new modes of commons governance do not happen every day. We need to make the most of this historic moment. Sign the Connecting.NYC petition today!

I don’t know the direct reach of Mr. Bollier’s blog, but I suspect a fair percentage of the most prominent thinkers and activists within the commons domain became aware of it. Not one person signed our petition in the following week.

More recently two of our tweets were re-tweeted, once to 19,000, by a top city official, and the another 10,000 via a prominent Internet research center. In the first instance we received 1 additional follower. From the second, perhaps 6 additional twitter followers.

Other SMs

Separate from our own encounter with SM, we note the following from the New York City politics.

Tweets Following Followers Listed
06/10/11
Thompson 380 278 1030 48
de Blasio 848 411 2478 180
Quinn 830 73 3721 273
Weiner 478 197 77274 2391
Sterne 6217 787 19236 1457
Bloomberg 1275 122 97238 3474