Kirsten and William had an article published in Advertising Age, “How to Build the ‘Brand Called You’ in an Online Era.” The article refers to the Online Identity Calculator we built to determine your GQ (Google Quotient). When I built this calculator, I was assuming it would be revealed to a small audience while in beta mode – not mentioned in Ad Age! But in a matter of hours it went from Ad Age to several popular bloggers and then news of it snowballed. Much to my chagrin, I had set the response function of the calculator to simply send email with the collected data to a mailbox specifically created for this purpose. I started to notice email trickling in with data…then the trickle became a flood. I went from 20 messages in a ten minute period to about 1800 by the end of the day. I scrambled to stop the email and activated the database code I had waiting in the wings, commented out the email notification lines and then sat back and issued the command:

select count(*) from idstats

In 15 minutes it went from zero to nearly 300 database entries (rows) and within a few days, it surpassed 21K rows. Talk about underestimating response.