First, the important stuff: in three days we had the link to our team's page put in front of over two million people.
In terms of direct reach, this was partially done by mobilizing the massive and well dispersed HBS network. HBS Alumni chapter presidents were helpful in passing on our message. We can confirm over 10,000 direct HBS emails sent out on our behalf, with thousands more up in the air because of non-confirmation. Now, if you take 5% of that 10k HBS alumni figure as the amount of people who forwarded on our message, that's 500 HBS alums reaching say 50 more people each. That's another 25,000 people, and perhaps we can even say that 1% of that group forwards on to 20 more people. So that's another 5,000 directly reached via email. So far for the sake of our exercise, we're up to 40,000 people through HBS alumni emails alone.
Then you've got to take into account our direct reach to current HBS students. That's another 1,800 students or so, and you've got to think they're perhaps more active in spreading the word because many of them know our team directly. So let's still say 5%, to be conservative, forwarded our email on to 50 people. That's another 5,000 reached.
So in terms of direct reach, we're at 45,000 to 50,000 through HBS cumulatively.
Now the numbers start getting really high through our indirect reach. We had messages put up on Twitter from @HBSNews, @HBSAlumni, @joinred, @abc, and tons of HBS and non-HBS friends that by follower count reach about two million people. One message from @joinred was retweeted (forwarded) by 72 people. If you assume the average twitter account has 50 followers, then that means another 3,600 impressions. So the numbers quickly start adding up. And I'm not even taking into account all the people who wrote FB notes about us, shared our link on Facebook, or even the professors who blogged about Project Red Balloon.
Of course, I can't fail to mention the abcnews.com article that Brad hooked us up with -- this was another example of where the HBS network really came through. There's not a good way to estimate how many people saw that article, but it's definitely in the thousands since it ran on the abcnews.com home page for a while.
And then you've got to take into account our ad spend. This was something we kept quiet about for the couple of days we worked on this, but it did increase our impressions around the web. Just on Facebook ads alone, we had 53,417 impressions. On Google AdWords, we had another 8,463 impressions but had many more clicks here because (of course) people were searching for "red balloon" on Google. Cumulative, that's another 60,000 impressions via ad spend.
So these are all the numbers and the general reach that we had in less than 3 days. Just adding up the numbers, it's substantially over 2 million impressions, with a few hundred thousand directly reached via email or other social networks.
What I'll do is a follow-up post on what we could have done better in the short amount of time we had to organize. Look for that post in the next few days with what I think are a few lessons learned and some added meaning to the numbers I just shared.
