Handshake 2.0 experienced a record spike in traffic on February 23, 2009 in response to our blog post Clicking Back Over the Years:  Most Wired Town in America.

We attribute that traffic to a timely topic of national, even international interest, fine writing by the blog post’s author, Z. Kelly Queijo, a carefully pre-planned and then executed Web 2.0 / social media / PR 2.0 / public relations campaign, a benevolent online network that voluntarily spread the word about the story, and the mystery of Web 2.0.

We used Google Analytics to study the sources of our traffic spike.

We offer to you our conclusions about our Web 2.0 / social media / PR 2.0 / public relations campaign:

• It’s about the blog post.  While the spike in traffic brought more visits to more of our posts and pages, it was our blog post, not our blog as a whole, that attracted traffic.

• "It's still who you know.”  Top source of traffic?  People who know about Handshake 2.0 and accessed the site directly with its URL.

• Content matters.  Keywords matter.  Second highest source of traffic?  Google.  Google "likes" the words we use, to whom we link, and who links to us.

• Tweets matter.  Third highest source of traffic?  Twitter.  Either every URL thrown out there gets clicked on or, ideally, the words we use in our 140 characters entice “clickation.”