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If you follow my articles or follow me on any social media site, you probably heard all the excitement about the American Airlines Orange Juice incident. This article is not about the incident itself, but about what happens online when something you do goes viral. When the story first broke on The Consumerist, my site got a bunch of hits, but not more than it could handle. Only a handful of people that read the article were clicking on the link to my site. I can only imagine how many hits they got on that story. The kicker was when someone posted a direct link to the article on Fark.com. I knew Fark was a bigger site, but had no idea it would generate that kind of traffic. My site could hardly take it. I had a pretty large bandwidth package from Godaddy.com and I figured it would be fine if anything went viral. But I was wrong.

There are two major server issues you need to look out for if you go viral. The first one is bandwidth. I had a limited bandwidth account, meaning once a certain amount of data had been uploaded to reader's web browsers, Godaddy would begin to charge. Luckily, I caught it on time. I've had a few instances before on other servers with this same issue, but I'd have to say that Godaddy really handled this in a timely manner. If you follow my blog, you'll probably find posts about nightmares with other server companies. Godaddy is NOT one of them. Not only does Godaddy answer the phone within minutes instead of an hour, but the person who answers the phone is not a proxy. They actually know what they're talking about. I've always been impressed with this, and the OJ incident was business as usual. I use a service called Woopra to monitor live web traffic. Once my site started crawling and hardly loading, I checked the stats. There were consistently 150+ people on the site at any given moment. Tens of thousands had been visiting my site. The traffic was sucking up my bandwidth. Godaddy told me I had used 80% of my year's bandwidth in one day and that charges would occur once I hit the limit. They were able to quickly change it to an unlimited account without ANY downtime whatsoever and charged the difference in price to my card on file. I was up and running within 10 minutes tops. The second server issue is something I haven't yet tackled, and that's my maximum connections. This is because I used shared hosting which has to share with other sites on the same server. The benefit of this is a lower price. If you think of data like water, it makes more sense. I upgraded to use unlimited water, but I was sharing a hose with 50 other people. If I want to use the entire hose and allow more people to drink at one time, I would need a dedicated hose, or in real terms, a dedicated server. If my numbers begin to stay like this on a regular basis, I'll surely upgrade.

So, the server issues were out of the way. The next step was to tackle comments, both the management and content. I'm a believer in allowing everyone to comment on the site, but I already have comments on lock-down because of spammers. I hate spammers, so I choose to approve ALL comments. This usually isn't a big deal, but there were so many comments to approve I couldn't even keep up. I approve all types of comments unless they're vulgar and unnecessary. Comments that cuss every-other word and have nothing to do with the actual story don't get approved. If you don't agree with me, that's fine. I'll still publish it, but if you start calling me a douche on my own site I obviously delete it. Of course, that's not possible on other sites. This is when you really have to put up the emotional shield. There are millions of people out there on the internet, most of them teens, who think they are indestructible behind the anonymity of the internet. I see why some congressmen have proposed getting rid of internet anonymity. They're very sensitive to people updating and changing their wiki page and making nasty blog comments. If something of yours goes viral, be prepared to let it all roll off. Anonymous people will say the most insensitive, stupid things, and they only do it to have fun at your expense. They'll say things they would never say to your face, and the only thing you should do is ignore it. The only reason they say it is because they want attention. It doesn't mean you can't talk to these people. I love Gary Vaynerchuk and his writings, so I follow his advise of talking to your audience. I replied as many comments on different sites as I could. There were so many that I still haven't read all of them. People had questions and comments, and I really wanted to address them, but I made a point not to get into any flame wars. That's just a waste of time. I did, however, have a little fun with a couple people. I noticed that some of these people who called me an "idiot" or a "douche" forgot that they had user profiles. Many of these profiles had email addresses and Facebook profile links. They forgot that they weren't anonymous. Just for fun, I decided to send a little message to three or four of them as a study of social media. I asked, "Why do you think I'm a douche for defending a fellow customer on my flight? I'm sure you and I would probably get along fine in real life, so why the name calling?" This is exactly the opposite of what they would expect. They forgot that they left a trail for people to find them online. A couple didn't respond, one apologized, and one stopped responding after a couple responses. (Probably out of embarrassment.) Again, I'm not telling anyone to track down ALL negative comments online because it's a waste of time, but I really found it interesting to do a little social experiment and see if these anonymous people would back up their statements. They probably never thought I would personally respond.

A quick word of advice on contact info... Use a contact form instead of posting your email address online. This will keep the spammers away, and the trolls from bugging you. The only drawback to this is that people can send you email with a fake return address. These are usually people with nasty comments anyway, and since you're already accustom to letting it all slide, this shouldn't bug you. Don't feed the trolls. Make sure your home address is not on your website. If someone gets really pissed off about your post, they may try to find you. Hopefully this would never be an issue, but you should be careful. If you really need to post an address, use a P.O. Box. Your public telephone number needs to be disposable as well. You don't want your personal number anywhere on your site. Google Voice is the perfect use for something like this. If someone starts bugging you, you can block them. I didn't have any problems like that, but I can imagine it happening if a site like 4chan got ahold of a number. Don't take your number down completely. My phone was the primary means of communication that the major TV networks used to contact me.

Talking to your audience on Twitter and Facebook is great, but what else should you do when you go viral? Create more content. Create related posts and maybe even some non-related posts. Most of these people will probably only visit your site once, so if you want to hook a few, you need to do it quickly. In this case, I uploaded videos and audio about the incident so that people would click on related items while visiting. I also kept up my usual content. Not everyone reading that story would be interested in my usual tech writing, but I'm sure a small percentage would.

If you go viral, enjoy it. Your internet fame will probably only last a few days, or maybe a week. Soak it all in, enjoy it, and take advantage of it.