Behind The Scenes Of An Outlier

Yesterday when I published Gipsie Ranney’s white paper “Remembering Nummi” I did so because I thought she made some points that others would be interested in.

Let me take you behind the scenes of WordPress. One of the things this little program makes available is a stats tracker. This is the graph of daily “Site Views” over the last month. I think the graph speaks for itself:

Needless to say “Remembering Nummi” got some legs under it.

Looking at the graph, you can see that this site has a pretty steady pulse to it. The dips are weekends. The little (second highest) spike you see correlates with a link back from a site in Europe. Looking at this, and other information, I can reasonably conclude that I have a couple of dozen regular readers, probably from feeds, and the difference is click through traffic from other sites and search engine traffic.

Something different obviously was going on today.

I also see the regular sources of click-throughs to this site. This is a pretty typical list:

gembapantarei.com/2009/01/the_essenti…
leanblog.org
google.com/reader/view
leansupermarket.com/servlet/Page?temp…
google.ca
gembapantarei.com
gembapantarei.com/2009/01/finding_tim…
linkedin.com/mbox?displayMBoxItem=…
us.mc354.mail.yahoo.com/mc/showMessag…
search.conduit.com/Results.aspx?q=Typ…
170.2.59.38:15871/cgi-bin/afterWorkOp…
my.yahoo.com/p/3.html
translate.google.com.br/translate?hl=…

But here is today’s:

tmalive.tma.toyota.com/toyota/story.c…
dailynews.tma.toyota.com/story.cfm?st…
clipsheet.ford.com/article_view.cfm?a…
clipsheet.ford.com/article_view.cfm?a…
dailynews.tma.toyota.com
clipsheet.ford.com/article_view.cfm?a…
toyota.lonebuffalo.com/story.cfm?stor…
global.clipsheet.ford.com/article_vie…
tmalive.tma.toyota.com/toyota
global.clipsheet.ford.com/article_vie…
dailynews.toyota.com/story.cfm?story_…

So I conclude that “Remembering NUMMI” got picked up by a couple of news clipping services and fed into Toyota and Ford.

First, then, is a “Welcome” to any new readers from these great companies. Please feel free to peruse, comment, and even offer to write a guest post.

Though I cannot attribute to anything other than who does, or does not, subscribe to a particular clipping service, I did find it ironic that this article, really taking a critical look at the need for government guaranteed “bailout” loans to the automotive industry, was read exclusively by people in two companies who (so far) have not asked for any help. (I speak primarily of Ford here – they conspicuously said “We can get by for right now, thank you.“

To this I offer a personal comment – as a former Boeing employee I have met (though certainly did not know) Alan Mullaly (now CEO of Ford). While no leader is perfect, I believe he is certainly capable of helping the Ford culture to “confront the brutal facts” of their business. My main question about Ford is whether they had already hit the iceberg when they brought him on board.

To GM and Chrysler, though, I guess I would offer: Gipsie Ranney seems to be talking to you guys. It would behoove you to listen to her. Yes there are devestating external factors at work, but guys… your boat was leaking faster than the bilge pumps were pumping long before the storm. Stop blaming the weather and take a look inside. That is where your issues are.