Winning The Web Traffic Lottery

I continue to explain to people that this social media thing is not the quick fix, not the get rich quick and not the answered prayer or the be all and end all of business revival medicines.  Every time a story hits the Internet that gets a viral following, or a YouTube Video goes crazy, or something happens that causes a server somewhere to crash from the load of traffic to a company blog or website, I know I’ll be getting an email or a call.  The question first out the mouth of the caller or the subject line of that  urgent email:

“How can we get a viral component planned for our company?”

My response is something less than jovial, and sometimes it is met with sarcastic responses like “I wish I could bottle that”, or something along the lines of “Better yet let’s go buy that winning Powerball lottery ticket!” 

I recently read a post from a blogger that talked about those social media people that you need to run away from.  He hit the nail on the head when he said to run away from a consultant that says:

“We will implement a viral marketing strategy.”
Uh, no you won’t. Viral is the effect, not the cause. If someone says, “I can make a viral video,” please show him the door.

Yes, I completely agree.  Not only show them the door but make sure to report them to the social media police.

I tend to cringe when I see things like the company that somehow “positions” itself on page one of various networking sites.  The stars aligned well for them and they got a bump or large spike in traffic. Then I see them as they are bragging to all of their friends how their servers crashed under the weight of traffic that came to see their product.  Yes, it is pretty cool to watch and I have seen it happen first hand.

After that traffic spike honeymoon is over however, they don’t talk about the return to normalcy as they continue to struggle to get those much needed conversions.  In fact, they soon find that their conversion and other numbers have been skewed by the strange anomaly that occurred.  At this point, all we can really do as consultants is to tell you where and how to buy your chance at the golden lottery ticket, but I cannot tell you which one of those tickets will crash your server.