The dust has finally settled on the Sheen media hurricane from the past couple of weeks and bloggers have pretty much moved on in expectation of the next easy content fustercluck. Internships.com however, who paid at least 100K for the Ad.ly campaign (in the guise of a social media intern job post), is reaping the benefits of the two Sheen tweets, and have revealed their related traffic totals to TechCrunch in the wake of the blitz.
According to its internal Omniture data, Internships.com saw 1,035,021 unique visitors (almost two uniques per link click) as a result of the tweets and the subsequent shares and media attention (Representative Todd Leeloy tells me they subtracted out normal and affiliate traffic to get these numbers).
Between the campaign’s run of 1:03pm PST on Monday March 7th and midnight on Friday March 11th, the original bit.ly link received over 475,375 clicks and over 82,148 people applied for the internship, which Internships.com CEO Robin Richards tells me will be boiled down to 50 highly qualified candidates (eliminating all the reporters who applied as an experiment for example).
While internships.com says Sheen is “absolutely not” their spokesperson, in my opinion jury’s still out on what you call someone who is paid to tweet (hint: “spokesperson” would be a good word for it). But whatever you may call it and what ever you may think of Sheen’s lifestyle, these numbers are another bit of evidence proving that Twitter as a marketing tool can no longer be ignored.