Rob Saker's Blog

Good customer service operates on the premise that all customers deserve a base level of respect. Customer Relationship Management tools are useful in identifying which customers to treat with additional courtesies, but many organizations have an attitude of using these tools to lessen the base quality of service to other customers.

Tools to help ensure optimal performance and availability have been available to large commercial sites for years, but the cost of these capabilities has left them out of reach of the average web site operator. The existing technologies have also dealt largely with the big opportunities, allowing developers to become lazy in their coding practices.

2010 sees the introduction of two key developments that will drive additional innovation and adoption of affordable performance technologies to the masses.

While large sites focus on content delivery networks and loading up on big iron to more quickly process requests, small web site operators that intelligently approach the problem can compete with large web site operators by making small optimizations.

What is the size of the opportunity with these changes? 20-25% reduction in response time. That reduction in effort also reduces the load on web and application servers, allowing them to focus on serving the dynamic elements of your site. Before pursuing advanced capabilities, consider whether reducing 25% of your load is worth the effort.

The government released facts on it’s “Cash for Clunkers” program. This program was positioned as a way to assist an industry in trouble and reduce the carbon impact of cars by improving fuel economy.

While it’s too early to determine the true impact of the program, the initial facts do illustrate some interesting findings.

I will be participating on a panel on Tuesday, July 21, 2009 at the New York Festivals International Advertising Awards discussing “How to Profit from It & Get Clients to Buy Into It.” You can find more information on the panel at the NYF International Ad Awards web site.

I had the opportunity to meet and share a few drinks with Alan Wolk last night. Alan is a bright guy who works with great brands on identifying how they explore and engage in the social media space.

We’re frequently asked by non-Twitter users what Twitter is and what it’s all about. My friends understand it’s social, and typically lump it in together with Facebook, MySpace and even LinkedIn, and IM (depending on level of knowledge).

Oprah Winfrey was introduced to Twitter on April 17, 2009 by Evan Williams and Ashton Kutcher. Within moments of her first tweet, thousands of people responded to her.

This could have been a transformative moment in media. For a brief moment, television’s arguably most successful personality was engaging directly with her audience in a dynamic conversation. Instead, Oprah stuck to the traditional broadcast metaphor that built her empire, and with which she was comfortable. @Oprah’s limited replies to people, other than celebrities for dinner invitations, supports that she’s not leveraging Twitter as a conversation tool.

If you’re reading this during the Razorfish Client Summit, I’m hoping it’s because I had the #1 organic spot for razorfunfish on Google. I had to leave early this AM on the redeye to Atlanta for another work engagement, but I’ve asked our Razorfish team be my representative. They asked that I blog about how I seized 31 on Google for the ‘razorfunfish’ term.

Razorfish is running a meme experiment to see how we can drive traffic around an idea. They’ve coined the term razorfunfish to see who can generate traffic.

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yahooBuzzArticleHeadline = “Social Meme Experiment”;
yahooBuzzArticleId = “http://www.robsaker.com/2009/04/23/social-meme-experiment/”;

[...]

We’re at Razorfish Client Summit in Las Vegas, and they mentioned that there were no term matches for razorfunfish on Google. They then cryptically explained to watch tomorrow (Thursday).