Performance Zen

Author: spierzchala

  • Web Performance: The Strength of Corporate Silos

    When I meet with clients, I am always astounded by the strength of the silos that exist inside companies. Business, Marketing, IT, Server ops, Development, Network ops, Finance. In the same house, sniping and plotting to ensure that their team has the most power.

    Or so it seems to the outsider.

    Organizations are all fighting over the same limited pool of resources. Also, the organization of the modern corporation is devised to create this division, with an emphasis on departments and divisions over teams with shared goals. But even the Utopian world of the cross-functional team is a false dream, as the teams begin to fight amongst themselves for the same meager resources at a project, rather than a department level.

    I have no solution for this rather amusing situation. Why is it amusing? As an outsider (at my clients and in my own company) I look upon these running battles as a sign of an organization that has lost its way. Where the need to be managed and controlled has overcome the need to create and accept responsibility.

    Start-ups are the villages of the corporate world. Cooperation is high, justice is swift, and creative local solutions abound. Large companies are the Rio de Janeiro’s of the economy. Communication is so broken that companies have to run private phone exchanges to other offices. Interesting things have to be accomplished in the back-channel.

    This has a severe effect on Web performance initiatives. Each group is constant battling to maintain control over its piece of the system, and ensure that their need for resources is fulfilled. That means one group wants to test K while another wants to measure Q and yet a third needs to capture data on E.

    This leads to a substantial amount of duplication and waste when it comes to solving problems and moving the Web site forward. There is no easy answer for this. I have discussed the need for business and IT to find some level of understanding in previous posts, and have yet to find a company that is able break down the silos without reducing the control that the organization imposes.

  • Performance Alerting: Is Louis Gray the Canary in Your Coal Mine?

    Yesterday in the Fast Company Live Fail Whale session [mention on Scoble’s blog here], Paul Bucheit of FriendFeed jokingly said that his company’s external alerting mechanism was Louis Gray.
    I cringed when I read that, as the last people who should be letting you know you have an issue are your visitors or customers. I know that FriendFeed is new and may not have the ops team that Dorion Carroll and Technorati have developed over the years, but it is still critical.
    You have done a lot as a company to build a brand. Don’t let your internal and external performance sully your reputation. There are a number of low-cost and free ways to watch your performance and alert you before things break.
    Louis Gray is a great guy. But he is not an objective and reliable way to alert you when something is wrong with your site.

  • Technorati 1,000,000 – Help Me Break Into It!

    <sarcasm>
    Currently, the Newest Industry sits at #1,106,225 in the Technorati Charts. I’m looking to break into the Technorati 1,000,000 before Christmas.
    If Chris Brogan can get into the Technorati 100, I know I can do this!
    Help me break into this elite group!
    </sarcasm>

  • Why Do I Do This? – Educate, Guide, and Solve

    This is the year I turn 40. As a result, I am looking back upon my life, my career, and trying to determine what I do best. If I could make my life into an elevator pitch, what would it be?

    I decided to take what I do right now and see how low I could take it. What does my career boil down to?

    It came down to three simple words: Educate, Guide, and Solve.
    Each of these describes a facet of my career that provides a profound sense of personal satisfaction. Each of these is unique in that they give me the chance to share what I know with others, while still gaining new experiences in the process.

    These three things are simultaneously selfish and selfless. I believe that in order to have a successful, productive, and fulfilling career, these three things need to serve as the foundation of everything I do.

    Educate

    I work in a small community of Web performance analysts. I have spent years training myself to see the world through the eyes of a Web site and how it presents to the outside world. As I taught myself to see the world this way, I was asked to share what I knew with others.

    At first I did this through technical support and a training course I helped develop. Then I moved into consulting. I began to blog and comment on Web performance.
    I needed to share what I knew with others, because it is meaningless to hoard all of your knowledge. While I am paid well as a consultant, it is also important that as many people as possible learn from me; and that doesn’t always need to sold to the highest bidder.

    Guide

    While some may say that there is no difference between Guide and Educate, I see a profound chasm between the two.

    We have all been educated at some point. We have sat through classes and lectures and labs that convey information to us, and have provided the foundation for what we know.

    But we have also encountered people who have shown us how to step beyond the information. They place the information that they are giving us in a larger context, allow us to see problems as a component of the whole.

    That is what I strive to do. Not only do I want to give people the functional tools they need to interpret the data, I want them to then take that data and see the patterns in the data. I work closely with colleagues and customers, helping them see the patterns, understand how they tie to the things I say everyday, and then be able to solve this type of problem on their own the next time.

    A guide is only useful when the path is not known. Once I have showed someone the path, I can return to my place, in the knowledge that they are as experienced on the path as I am.

    Solve

    Once you have shown someone what the data can do, how to see the patterns, it is critical that they have an understand how to take that pattern and change it for the better. Seeing a pattern and understanding its cause are only the beginning.
    I can share my experiences, share how others have solved problems similar to this one, help them fix the problem.

    And then be able to show that the problem is solved. An unmeasured, yet resolved problem, is meaningless.

    Summary

    This is the skeletal description of what I want to achieve in my career. I could expand these topics for a lot longer, but the question I propose is: What three concepts can you boil your career down to?

  • Branding v. Reputation: Idea Pairing

    I spent some time today pairing ideas that separate Branding from Reputation. These came from my discussion of Branding being closed-source and Reputation being open-source [here].
    It’s just a start, but it’s a start.

  • Marketing and Social Media: The Bullseye of Communicating

    Marketing has traditionally been a two-pronged attack on your mind and your wallet, designed to find the most effective ways to reach your mind, and get you to part with your money.

    The techniques used to identify who to go after, how to go after them, and why this message will work drives a social media campaign as much as it does an old-school marketing campaign. The traditional layers in this model are targeting and messaging.

    What is interesting is that the emergence of social media has turned a two-layer model into a three-layer model. The third layer has always been there, it just hasn’t been large enough to matter to anyone until the last 2-3 years.

    The navel-gazing that is occurring in the social media marketing community is due to the rise of this third layer, the layer that is concerned with communicating.

    This is not the communications that so many organizations confuse with branding.

    This is the communication that focuses on the best way to isolate conversations, identify engaged audiences, and participate in communities.

    Targeting

    The science of marketing lives here. Demographics are the foundation of the targeting phase of any marketing campaign. What does the market we are trying to reach look like?

    In this area, Lookery and QuantCast provide organizations with the data they need to decide when and where there message should go.

    Messaging

    This is where the science becomes the visible. Advertising and branding create the message that portrays the product to the customers, using the information gathered in the targeting phase.

    Advertising and branding are not the same thing. Branding is the overarching vision that a product wants to push to the world while advertising is the ephemeral visual and aural methods used to get the brand embedded in the consciousness of a population.

    Communicating

    The third, and most critical circle in this cycle is communication. It is the one that companies so often get wrong, and that is garnering such a great deal of interest now. I would argue that until recently, companies have not understood communication, preferring to try and shape communication remotely, using advertising and branding, rather than engaging in it directly.

    An organization that actively engages in communication is one that has a willingness to walk out from behind the safety of its brand and its advertising and talk to customers. Participate in conversations. Shape communities that emerge either for or against the product.

    This is what companies are having so much difficulty with.

    Attention and Reputation

    Communicating with clients is the smallest circle because so few companies are doing it at all, and those that do it find it so hard to get right. What organizations have found is that attempting to use communication in the same way they use their existing marketing tools leads to failure here.

    Getting the attention of a population of key customers is a targeting and messaging success. Holding the attention of these customers doesn’t require new advertising and a constantly refreshed brand. The people who we listen to most have a reputation, have opinions we trust.

    It will be interesting to watch the true evolution of Corporate Communication (Corporate Conversations?) circle evolve in the next few years.

  • Peter Kim's discussion of Social Media Marketing and Scalability

    If you are interested in the area of social media marketing, head over to Peter Kim’s blog and check out Social Media Marketing’s Scalability Problem. The post is excellent, and the comments are the kind of conversation that needs to be had in this area.
    The best comments so far:

    The interesting thing is that this post is nearly two months old. And without realizing it, that’s about the time I started writing about conversation and community, branding v. reputation, and how the content-based advertising algorithms are failing the social media market.

    I agree with the commenters and Peter Kim that there is a scalability problem when you are trying to have a conversation. that’s why companies rely so much on branding. However, if you take the time to build a community, you don’t have to scale your own conversation, as you will have the community willing to build your reputation.

    Conversations and community happen around the reputation of brands, people, and products. And where there is a gap between the branding message and the reputation conversation, that’s when the greatest problems arise.

  • (Personal) Branding is Closed-Source

    Last night I asked myself what would happen if blogs and social-media sites were no longer allowed to have advertising on them. What would be the revenue model for them? How would they generate income?

    I fell back to the position that these sites were not originally created to be driven by advertising, but to develop “personal brands”, a topic that has been discussed by Chris Brogan [here and here] and others.

    Then I realized something else: The idea of a personal brand, and the concepts of community and conversation, are mutually exclusive. How can a brand interact with a community? How can a brand participate in a conversation?

    People do these things. And while brands are important to people when thinking about companies, when dealing with with people, there is a far more important factor that gives a person’s opinion weight in a conversation: Reputation.

    In a conversation and in a community, how you are perceived, regarded, and trusted is critical to allowing what you say to matter. If you have no reputation, your opinion may be politely listened to, and promptly ignored.

    It comes to this: Branding and Brands, be they corporate or personal, are closed-source. By their nature a brand is something that is directed and defined by the brand-ee, not the community.

    Reputation is the opposite of that. Reputation is what a brand gets from the community, from the conversation had outside the branded entity.
    What does this mean?

    Branding is closed-source. Reputation is open-source.

  • PageRank for Social Media is a Broken Metaphor

    When I posted Advertising to the Community: Is PageRank a Good Model for Social Media? a couple of days ago, I was working in a vacuum. I was responding to some degree to the infamous BusinessWeek article [NB: Ancient link no longer active], and to the comments Matt Rhodes made on the idea of PageRank being used to rate social media participation.

    Turns out I am not alone in criticizing this simplistic approach rating the importance and relevance of conversations and community. Mark Earls comments on the power of super-users [here], and how the focus on these influencers misses the entire point of community and conversation. John Bell of the Digital Influence Mapping Project and Ogilvy points out that the relationships in social media and online communities are inherently more complex than creating a value based on the number of interactions someone has with a community [here].

    This conversation is becoming very interesting. There are a lot of very bright people who are considering many different approaches to ranking the importance of a conversation or a community based not only on who is participating, but how engaged people are.

    If communities or conversations are run and directed by a select group of people, then they are called dictatorships or lectures. Breaking down, rather than erecting, barriers is why social media is such a powerful force.

  • FriendFeedHolic – A Social Media Ranking Model for Advertising and Marketing Success

    One of the most challenging things in social media is finding the conversation leaders. Those people who drive the conversation, and create a community.
    FriendFeedHolic (ffholic) has taken the base knowledge that exists in FriendFeed and added a ranking mechanism to it based on input and output. In fact, they weight the participation in the FriendFeed community more heavily than participation in other communities.
    This is important. Although FriendFeedHolic is separate from FriendFeed, they have found the way to isolate and target those users who are most likely to participate and create conversations. These users, be it Scoble or Mona N, are where advertisers and marketers can target their money.
    How would they do this?
    Think about it. If someone that is a large commenter or conversation-creator on FriendFeed creates new content, they are assigned a higher ranking in the new conversation-driven ad-discovery model that advertisers will have to create to succeed.
    This new targeted advertising logic will be forced to discover:

    • The content of the conversation
    • The context of the conversation
    • The tone of the conversation
    • The participants in the conversation

    This model will be able to identify when it is an inward-facing conversation that involves mostly super-users, or if it is a conversation that engages a wide-spectrum of people.
    Conversations among super-users will lead to more passive advertising being shown, as that is a spectator event, with only a few participants.
    Conversations created by super-users, or that involve super-users, but have a higher participation from the general community will get more intelligent attention to ensure that the marketing messages and advertising shown fit the four criteria above.
    In this new model, advertisers will have to see that they can’t simply slap a set of ads up on the popular kids web sites. They will have to understand who leads a community, who generates buzz, and who can engage the most people on a regular basis.
    In this model, the leader has far less power than the community that they create. And maintain.