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.

Vegan-Free Gluten, An East-Bank Food Search

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WSausagee just moved to the Eastbank Commerce Center, on Water ave, and even though we can almost see our old office across the river, as far as food options go, it’s like we’ve moved to another city fifty years ago. From the previous office, we were right around the block from a slew of food carts. (Oh how we miss you Sonny Bowl) There were also tons of other vegan / gluten free options within easy walking distance.

I’Friesve discovered why the east bank is referred to as the “industrial” district. It’s clearly a reference to the size of the deep fryers at the brew pubs littering the area. Imagine going from 6 great vegan options at one food cart, to 6 options within a couple blocks, and three of those are actually deep fried. And really, can you even count a side of tots as an option?

There is hoGreen smoothiepe though, veganism appears to be sprouting and sending out gluten free shoots in the area. A Kure juicing company has opened across the street, and I discovered Cookies Cupcakes and more, which opened a few weeks ago under the hawthorne bridge. The more includes a fairly robust menu of vegetarian options. and if you get at least 3 flavors of cupcakes, that makes a complete meal, right?

 

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!