Comment: Web PR great but can misfire
Nov 13 2008 by Neil Stephenson for The Journal
FEW businesses, if any, can afford not to have an online presence. Digital marketing is big business, with firms investing millions of pounds in online campaigns, and websites will often be the first port of call for customers seeking information as broadband access becomes near universal.
The internet offers a fast and effective channel to find busy customers with the click of a button; it provides unlimited space and, because it works in real time, there is a fast turnaround of results.
However, too many businesses make the mistake of failing to ensure underlying IT infrastructure can support the hosting needs of big-budget online campaigns. Most hosting packages can support sporadic “spikes” in activity, but big campaigns are characterised by very heavy traffic in a very short time which can soon bring websites to a standstill.
It is common for businesses simply to buy a domain name without looking at the hosting provider of the website and ensuring it can handle a short term, high-intensity campaign. Marketing departments often don’t let IT departments know about the campaign until it is too late.
The penalties for this are high. A prime example is the 1901 Census website, launched in 2002 and withdrawn five days later amid overwhelming demand. It was designed to cater for 1.2 million users a day. But 1.2 million users an hour were trying to access it. It did not reopen for seven months.
Not only is this a PR disaster, it also has implications for search engine optimisation (SEO) or increasing traffic to a website through online search engines. For a site to maintain a customer’s interest, responses have to be immediate – few will have patience to wait for a website that does not load instantly. So, many top search engines now use website response rates and server speed in their ranking procedure. Businesses with ineffective hosting packages for campaigns stand to suffer twice.
Many internet providers now offer bespoke hosting packages to cater for big online campaigns and the additional costs incurred by this must be taken into account when budgeting for the campaign.
There are four factors to consider when selecting a package. The first is the bandwidth of the hosting provider and how fast data is transferred from site to customer. The second is the server capacity, or the number of visitors the website can support at one time.
Two other frequently forgotten factors are the number of online inquiries a website can handle, and whether the business has the staff and capability to respond to them.
By choosing a good package and having a strategy addressing these four factors, an online campaign can be a very successful PR and marketing tool. Otherwise, rather than bolstering the reputation of a firm or driving sales, a campaign will do just the opposite.
Neil Stephenson is chief executive of Onyx Group
