Twitter on Wednesday was down for about an hour and a half, but no clear reason was given for the failure.

Visitors to the social networking site early in the morning were greeted with the familiar "fail whale" on their computer screens, instead of a functioning site. The cartoon whale is Twitter's way of trying to lessen user frustration during such incidents.

Twitter at first said the outage was "due to an extremely high number of whales." The site got more serious after it had recovered at about 8 a.m. Eastern time.

"A sudden failure coupled with problems in switching to a backup system produced a high number of errors for around 90 minutes," the company said on its blog. "This made the site largely inaccessible."

Twitter said no data was lost in the outage and that the site had not suffered a security breach.

The microblog service, founded in May 2007, has suffered technical problems in the past, which have been attributed to its rapid growth. The Web site enables people to broadcast messages of not more than 140 characters to networks of people.

Twitter will slow site performance by disabling features, such as custom searches, in order to accommodate heavy traffic, according to Rich Miller, editor and founder of Data Center Knowledge, which provides analysis of the data center industry.

"In recent weeks Twitter.com users have periodically encountered messages that the service was over capacity, but the condition was usually temporary," Miller wrote on his blog.

The latest outage was the longest sustained downtime since a denial-of-service attack in August that also affected other social networking sites. The attack brought the site down for more than two hours and slowed access to Blogger, Facebook and LiveJournal.

Living the Web

The Web has evolved. It used to be a place where people came to just search for simple information. Now it’s a place where people come to also share information. Information today that is multi-media and more complex. Information today that is real-time and social – recommended by people who know, and people you know.

We call this new place The Living Web, and we’ve designed an evolved engine to help you get the most from it – a service to help you live the new web. Although we have many ways to search and share information, the current experience is fragmented, ineffective, and ultimately inefficient. On the search side, there are a growing number of disconnected sites for traditional search, niche interests, audio, video, imagery and more.

On the sharing side, there is a universe of segregated social networks, blogs, real-time content, multi-media portals and more. This growing disconnection and segregation is the challenge we’ve decided to embrace. By providing a single, connected, multi-media experience for both searching and sharing traditional and real-time content, we’re hoping to make the new web easier, more integrated and efficient.

We believe our new web experience benefits everyone online. Existing portals and services benefit from a new found search integration that offers them more user engagement. Consumers benefit with access to more of the information the new web has to offer, that was previously tucked away. But most of all, it benefits you, those living the web by searching and sharing the freshest, most relevant and most interesting content available anywhere. You’ve evolved, the web has evolved, the experience should too.

In today’s world social media seems to dominate most discussions related to online marketing.  However, one of the most successful, cost effective methods that should not be overlooked is still email.  Don’t loose track of opportunities to leverage email - it’s a winner when it’s done right. Here is a list of the top 10 tips to help guide you.

1. Understand the Regulations and the Rules

When you set out to use email as a marketing tool, be sure to research the CAN-SPAM Act and to understand the best practices approach to be compliant. A primary example of the regulations is enabling subscribers with the ability to unsubscribe, and when they do, they must be removed within 10 days.  There are other important parts of the Act which can be viewed at  http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/business/ecommerce/bus61.shtm

2. Build Your Own List - Don’t Buy One

Whenever you send an Unsolicited e-mail, you violate CAN SPAM. You must get permission from your subscribers.  It’s important to develop strategies and skills to build your list. The risk of buying and using a list are enormous. You can be quickly “black listed” and your company’s reputation can become damaged.

3. Personalize Subscriber Communications

Personalized content gets the best results as the value of relevant information delivered to match user preferences is huge. Many studies have proven that personalized content produces the best response including better open, read and click through rates compared to the one size fits all approach.

4. Get To The Point

Don’t overwhelm readers with content overload. Provide subscribers with enough information to take a desired action, such as buying an item, or clicking through to a web page for more detailed information. Overwhelming the reader will turn them off and could lead to an Unsubscribe.

5. Use Landing Pages

In conjunction with number 4 above, use landing pages. Leading readers back to landing pages that support content contained in email is a best practice. Doing so makes it easy for readers to scan an email and determine which content they are interested in and then clicking to read more or to take important next steps. Landing pages are very important and must be designed effectively. Please spend some time researching best practices for landing page design and development.

6. Consistent Frequency

If you are following best practices, then I hope to assume you are delivering valuable, personalized and relevant content to your permission based list. This being the case, it’s fair to think that your readers are looking forward to receiving your communications and want to know when to expect it. This is why consistent frequency is important. The more consistent the frequency of your email sends, the more your readers will look forward to receiving them.

7. Segmentation

Let’s face it, every subscriber is unique. That’s why personalization is so important. Understanding what makes subscribers different and then grouping them respectively enables you to increase the effectiveness of the communications that you send to them.

8. Track & Measure Results

Measuring results enables you to understand what is working and what’s not. The ability to improve is a huge opportunity that must be seized. Leveraging good testing practices will provide important insights that will help you achieve your email communication goals faster.

9. Proofread

The obvious is often overlooked. Proofreading should go without saying, but I get email communications  with spelling and grammatical errors in them all the time. Sloppy content makes your brand look sloppy. Don’t let this happen to you - make sure you have a QA process in place to support your email marketing campaigns.

10. Quality Content Is King

Delivering valuable, relevant content to your subscribers is the back-bone of successful, ongoing email communications. It’s important to take the time to plan and develop content that is of interest to your subscribers.  Doing research, using surveys and sometimes, simply asking readers what they want from you are good ways to determine what to include in your content mix.  Testing is another way to understand what resonates with readers.

If you have any questions about these tips or others that you would like to share, please let me know .

Back in 2001 Forrester Research asked people why they returned to a website and the overwhelming answer was ‘content.’ It’s still true today. Success in online PR and social media depends on the quality of your content. It’s about engaging people and the key to engagement is discovering what your audience thinks is good content. It's not up to you to decide what to publish. Your content strategy should be based on what your audience needs and wants.

In social media people are creating, reading, saving, tagging and sharing content. If you don’t produce the kind of content they value, it won’t get re-published or shared. How do you know what kind of content to create? Listen and observe. In the past we had to rely on agencies to have a ‘bright idea.’ But when you really listen to your audience, content opportunities easily spring to mind.

Example: A mortgage company discovered that young mothers in their first home were very concerned about the housing market and the sub-prime mortgage fiasco. They were looking for information in language they could understand. The company saw that they could write articles and do video interviews with their experts in a way that would answer the questions of concerned young mothers.

Example: A natural soda company that makes ginger products saw lots of discussion on Twitter about the health benefits of ginger. Immediately ideas started to flow about how to participate in this conversation – studies, recipes, articles, videos.

Example: a non –profit involved in drug rehabilitation found out that women turn to blogs for information, advice or recommendations. (2009 BlogHer Social Media study.) And what they value most is a review or comment from someone who has used that product or service. Since women are the ones who most often call the rehab centers – a wife, mother or sister of the addict - it was obvious that they needed to create content around the stories of women who had saved their families with this program and get it to women bloggers. Telling your story online in the right place to the right people gets results. But you need a well-thought out content strategy based on solid research to get those results.

I have been providing online content strategy and web production management for over ten years now and love sharing best practices, planning and integration strategies to companies who really want to improve their relevancy to their audience. Understanding your online audience and creating relevant business goals is the best first step.

Michael - International Web Guru
Get Mike Story for a consultation today: emailstory@gmail.com

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