Going Viral, Is Your Server Ready?

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Viral, just uttering the word makes online marketers start to salivate and also panic. You never know what will reach critical mass and go viral. Some pieces of content that have lain dormant, getting a few hits here and there, suddenly explode, generating thousands or even millions of hits almost overnight. Having a piece of content go viral can be great for business, but it can also be a disaster if you server isn’t able to handle the load.

SmokePicture this:

Your website is hosted by a discount company such as GoDaddy. This is fine when 1000 people a day are visiting. Then, without any warning, someone links to an especially cute cat photo on your site from Reddit. Suddenly 10,000 people are trying to access your site at once. The virtual server, which has a limited amount of processing resources available, struggles mightily under the onslaught of traffic. The site load times slow to a crawl, if people can get through at all. Not a great first impression for thousands of potential customers.

When the Google Bot comes crawling:Traffic Graph

Fathers day weekend one of our clients posted a blog. The image was picked up by Google Image search and the page ranked very high for a variety of web searches related to fathers day. As the traffic graph shows, there was a massive spike in traffic, with 2 months worth coming in over 2 days!

Over the course of about 10 hours, Google showed the image to 600,000 searchers, and the page to approximately 1.4 million.  That’s 2 million searchers, with the bulk of the traffic concentrated in the middle 6 hours.

Here’s what it looks like to your server:

Graph

The green bars on the graph represent the last MONTH’s worth of traffic. While the purple bars depict the 6 hour spike. The hit count exceeded 1 million, so I had to reduce it to fit it on the graph.

You can see that we had about 2x the number of average monthly visitors during the spike, and double the monthly pages viewed as well. The real fun was behind the scenes. Google hit (requested data from) our server over 1 million times, slurping up what would have been a year’s worth of bandwidth in a couple of hours!

So, how did our server handle it? No issues at all. We’re ready for your viral blog post.

Branding Yourself: Personal vs. Professional

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OfficeWhether you are a writer, musician, business owner, college grad or budding artist, you have an image. It’s an extension of who you are, an aura. It may be bold and easily recognizable or passive and harder to spot, but it’s there. It comes out in how you dress, how you do your job, how you drive, dance or make decisions. It’s an expression of who you are. If it’s weak, and you are trying to reach people, it might be time to turn up the volume. Without any discernable image, you will have a difficult time conveying who you are.

Sometimes there can be a temptation to hide behind a professional front. If you are a government agency, university or major corporation, this is preferable. But, if your audience is local and your reach is more hopeful than expected, an exclusively professional image will end up excluding the very people you are trying to reach.

People like people. (They dislike them as well, but that’s another article!) They prefer to deal with people rather than computers. That’s why it becomes paramount to pour out who you are into things that represents you, like websites and storefronts.

If one of your needs is to convey your abilities because they are not immediately apparent, such as for a doctor or architectural firm, then there is an opportunity to be creative. In Portland, we are fortunate to have a supportive community for blending creative talent and professional ability.

Some Bigger Examples

One of my favorite Portland businesses, New Seasons Market, has managed to keep their image personal through the years despite astounding growth. The colors, the fonts, the space, even the product line are all appealing. But the employees are the front-line extension of the owners. There is a careful attention to preservation of personality, not just functionality.

Whether you like their coffee or not, Stumptown Coffee has skewed their image corporate and professional. They reorganized a few years ago to go national. Their website does not feature people, but products, storefronts and lots of copy. For selling hot coffee, their image is, well, a bit cold.

Some Smaller Examples

Salt & Straw has a neat story to tell. Though their website is a bit dated, their branding is great. In the About Us section, you immediately feel like you know the owners, who are cousins. They tell their personal story and show candid photos of their lives.

VooDoo Doughnuts, while unappealing to me personally, definitely has a personality. In fact, their personality is so profound, that they have managed to garner quite a bit of national attention since they opened ten years ago.

Social Media and Branding

One of the most positive things about social media is that now there is a platform to connect directly with your fans, customers and clients outside of doing business. It’s really a very old-world concept. The difference is that now we share a lot more with a lot more people. It’s a natural place to express yourself. Granted, that can be a scary thing for some. It really ups the ante when it comes to offering consistent service to the public. Here are some tips:

  • Start small, test the waters.
  • Share who you are, don’t try to sell yourself. Talk about things you like.
  • At the same time, be sensitive and show some love. Not everyone will share your opinion.
  • Listen to your audience. Be open to criticism.

Be yourself. If people respond negatively, you can choose to ditch your efforts, change your audience or revisit who you are. The last one takes the most effort and is the least popular but tends to yield the best results.

Build your brand around your personality

Let your business extend around who you are. Decide what you want people to think of when they hear your name. When you don’t have to suppress your personality, you’ll enjoy your job even more!

What is digital marketing all about?

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sidewalkWhy should you care about digital marketing in Portland? After all, isn’t Portland one of those hyper-local places where people just know where businesses are and what they are about? Isn’t part of the fun discovering new places on foot and by word of mouth?

Indeed, this is true. However, people are steadily migrating to Portland, despite economic conditions. Rents are being raised at astonishing rates. To help guide newcomers to your business, a focused digital marketing presence is required. An aggressive campaign with annoying ads can be distasteful and expensive. But being there when a customer is looking for you is a different story. Being accessible, helpful and downright appealing draws in the perceptive, intellectual customers you are looking for. Skill is required to pull this off properly.

Besides newcomers and city visitors to Portland, most long-time residents look up new places frequently. Businesses are searched in a number of ways, mostly via Google. But, other directories, whether websites or apps, especially those with reviews, such as Yelp, are also widely used, sometimes just to find out whether a restaurant has gluten-free options or is kid-friendly.

Whether the result of a search engine, a casual social media mention on Facebook, a tweeted video or a direct hit, customers either land at your website or a listing before buying. All of the above (your “total web presence”) need to be accurate, inviting, helpful and consistent.

Wouldn’t it be great if there were creative types, who were also business experts, who could pull off a great experience for your customers? There are! Modern Interface is a small collaborative company with combined degrees and experience in both business (U. of Ala.) and art (Art Center in California). Our experience is well-rounded: advertising, web programming, branding, graphic design, business development and administration. We consult, research, target, plan and execute.

What we desire is to help our clients grow by making best use of awesome technologies at a low cost. We refine our processes, improving them constantly, and personalize each experience. And we often have a lot of fun working with our clients! We’re here because we love it. The internet is a fresh and fun place to work. Putting smiles on our clients’ faces is the cherry on top.

Any questions about digital marketing? Ask below!