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Aaron Worsham

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F isn't for Fast

My college roommate never knew how he was doing in his mechanical engineering class.  He would tell us that asking the TA about his grade was a waste of time;  she would only tell him in a heavy Asian accent that ‘He do failr’ which, when analyzed, could mean he was either doing fair or he completely failed. He said it was easier to not ask and hope for the best.

This little anecdote dovetails into your site’s performance, sorta.  The nastiest word that can be used in web professional circles is four letters and begins with an S.  Slow, as in ‘Cool site and all but way too slow’ is just about the harshest critique you can sling at a web colleague because it sums up all the things most of us are powerless to control.  There is rarely just one thing that is slowing down your website. Sometimes it is the database query times, but you tighten those up and now it looks like the images are too large.  So you optimize them only to find that html requests are timing out because of high cpu usage on the machine which you track down to ImageMagic which needs to be recompiled to fix a memory leak which you do but now your queries are running slow again.  Sometimes it feels easier to not ask, ignore the problem, and hope for the best.

But no, Yahoo has to come around and make a firefox plugin that gives your site a clear, easy to read, hard to ignore, at times overly critical grade for your site’s performance.  YSlow is modeled off of a list of Best Practices that Yahoo put out on where to speed up your website.  Seriously this is a really great tool to break down, isolate and identify hot spots in your sites load performance, which is the largest component to the appearance of a slow web site.  Try it out on your site and see what it says.  Just don’t take the grade too seriously.

P.S. for Sazbean, I like to think that F means Fantastic! ( and that I have some more work to do)

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Marketing hasn't always been social?

It took thousands of years before people who had no useful skills realized they could earn money by wearing nice clothes and designing deceptive brochures.
–The Joy of Work by Scott Adams

If the corporate world ran as Scott Adams described it to me (and I’m still convinced it does), the Marketing Department would have to be the most social group in every company.  A place where ‘people’ people engage in study groups discussing how their company’s products can make your life fulfilled.  This is where social got is legs, where the idea of a conversation with the customer was invented.  This is where the consumer is king and their voices are heard.  At least, that’s what the marketing textbooks say.

So why do I get the impression that few people, myself very much included, really understand what Social Media Marketing is all about?  Thankfully Ajit Jaokar has an article that has started me on the journey of understanding by framing some of the things I know I don’t understand.  I will admit, it took me a couple reads to absorb what Ajit is saying here, but it was worth the effort to get my head around it and to see things from his perspective.  Here are some of my takeaways

  • Social Media Marketing is not the same thing as Social Media Advertising.  The latter is placing ads for the social community while the former is starting a conversation with that community and seeing where it is going.  SMM can and will have a SMA element, but SMM is far more ambitious and advanced.
  • You can’t translate traditional ideas like CPM into Social Media Marketing, they just don’t apply.  You need to find new metrics to judge when you are succeeding and when you are missing your targets.
  • The idea that someone could sit on the sidelines and monitor all the little feeds of information in a social graph for a brand, even potentially alter the conversation’s direction, is wicked cool.  I wonder how close some of the huge brands like Coke or Nike or Apple are getting to doing just this kind of work.
  • A brand can serve the conversation by giving it focus.  Three ideas for this are listed as ‘Information’, ‘entertainment’, and ’cause’.  I’ve seen all three of these methods used in social advertising and never realized it at the time.
  • You could do some amazing things with the right data and a rapid response cycle.  Just imagining the short side potential of keeping advertising tied to Social Media’s latest feedback would be enormously effective.  Every ad would hit the right message, every campaign would be topical and fresh.  I’m sure there would be times when this would backfire, but the upside is enormous.

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This post will make you more attractive and successful

Now that is a headline. It’s bold. It’s confident. Its not true, but who cares? If you read this far than it did its job, hooking you the reader in through my digital storefront and into my shop to peruse my wares. That is what marketing does and that is why it still matters.

Steve Yegge starts us off right with his 2007 OSCON Keynote entitled ‘How to Ignore Marketing and Become Irrelevant in Two Easy Steps’

Marketing is the difference maker for me when evaluating a software project as being a Technical Success instead of a full out Success. It is not enough that people can use your web service because that is only a Technical Success. They have to prefer to use your service over the competition, prefer to use your application over the way they worked before, prefer to buy your new product over your old product because marketing has made it attractive for your customers to do so.

Advertisers and paying customers are more interested in the market leader than the technical leader.  Alex Kniess wrote a good piece on Scott Bedbury called ‘ Five ways a junior Employee can be a Change Agent’.  Its really a simple Marketing primer that applies to technology just as much as Advertising (his original audience).  With brands like Starbucks and Nike under his belt, it is a ridicious understatement to call Scott a subject expert. I like #3 ‘Make everything a pitch’ because marketing is like any learned behavior, it gets better with practice.  Also, you want to get your bad pitches out of the way early on on unimportant things.

We must remember that, like Steve mentions in his talk, marketing is a powerful way to create persistant pointers to ideas or concepts or things.  With a little effort, you can control where that pointer is directed.  If you don’t, your customers will for you.