social media – Performance Zen

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.

One of the ongoing themes is the way that slow or degrading response times can have a negative effect on how a brand is perceived. This is especially true when you start placing third-party content on your site. Jake Swearingen, in an article at VetureBeat, discusses the buzz currently running through the advertising world that Right Media is suffering from increasing latency, a state that is being noticed by its customers.

In the end, the trials and tribulations of a single ad-delivery network are not relevant to world peace and the end of disease. However, the performance of an advertising platform has an affect on the brands that host the ads on their sites and the on the brand of the ad platform itself. And in a world where there are many players fighting for second place, it is not good to have a reputation as being slow.

The key differentiators between advertising networks fighting for revenue are not always the number of impressions or the degree to which they have penetrated a particular community. An ad network is far more palatable to visitors when it can deliver advertising to a visitor without affecting or delaying the ability to see the content they originally came for.

If a page is slow, the first response is to blame the site, the brand, the company. However, if it is clear that the last things to load on the page are the ads, then the angst and anger turns toward those parts of the page. And if visitors see ads as inhibitors to their Web experience, the ads space on a page is more likely to be ignored or seen as intrusive.