As he did in life, Michael Jackson continues to break records in his death…

The death of superstar Micheal Jackson is turning out to be one of the biggest phenomenons that is illustrating the power of online and mobile communication throughout the world and is really fascinating from an Internet marketing perspective.

On a personal note…

Let me say that I am truly saddened by this news. As my regular readers know, I came to this country from the former USSR in 1975 as a young child and Off The Wall was the first album I ever owned, yes in full on vinyl.

His music was my first introduction to American pop and dance culture and coming from the USSR with both of my parents being classical concert pianists this was certainly a change of pace.

That album and the many great songs that came after hold a lot of great memories for me and brought me lots of joy throughout the years.

It is truly amazing the kind of impact he had on people all over the world. I suspect that we will learn that his early death could have been avoided, as with the many celebrities who came before him and I really hope that he can find some peace in death that he could not find in life.

The unprecedented impact of Michael Jackson’s death on the Internet:

The news of Michael Jackson’s death had an incredible impact on the Internet with record breaking traffic and search volumes that actually shut down Google for about 26 minutes on Thursday afternoon because they thought they were being attacked.

Google Trends labeled Thursday’s searches for “michael jackson died” as “volcanic.”

Thursday was also a record-breaking day for Yahoo when their story, “Michael Jackson rushed to hospital,” received 800,000 clicks in 10 minutes, which made it its highest-clicked story ever.

Yahoo revealed that Yahoo News set an all-time record with 16.4 million visitors, beating the old record of 15.1 million set last election day. The four million visitors between 3-4 pm also set an hourly record.

Twitter reported 5,000 Jackson-related tweets per minute on Thursday afternoon.

Facebook reported status updates in triple numbers on Thursday afternoon.

AOL, whose AIM messaging service was knocked offline for 40 minutes Thursday, stated “Today was a seminal moment in Internet history. We’ve never seen anything like it in terms of scope or depth.”

The massive search volumes also affected, Bing, as well as mobile communications which saw an unprecedented amount of text and communications volumes as well.

From an Internet marketing prespective this is quite fascinating and shows the power and speed of information distribution that is the Internet.

I was watching to see who had the story posted first, as thousands of bloggers, both in news and celebrity fields took to their keyboards to spread the news.

TMZ.com broke the story first, with CNN and local news channels following closely behind, but apparently Wikipedia still won out over everyone, including Twitter and poor Google (:-)) that struggled to revive after the massive search volumes.

Here is an interesting post by SEO Moz, that lists the exact time line of the developing news online:

A Bad Day for Search Engines: How News of Michael Jackson’s Death Traveled Across the Web

And Google’s official blog posted an explanation of their downtime and a search volume graph that really illustrates the spike in searches best at: Outpouring of Searches for the Late Micheal Jackson

On a lighter note…

Don’t we all wish to have at least 5% of that kind of traffic???? Incredible really.

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