A quote from Avinash Kaushik (Occam’s Razor and @avinashkaushik) to start this post.

I have a 10/90 rule . If your budget is $100 then spend $10 on tools and professional services to implement them, and spend $90 on hiring people to analyze data you collect on your website.

The web is quite complex, you are going to access multiple sources of data, you are going to have to do a lot of leg work. Blood, sweat and tears. You don’t just need tools for that (remember 85% of the data you get from any tool, free or paid is essentially the same). You need people!

Hire the best people you can find, tools will never be a limitation for them.

from This I Believe [A Manifesto for Web Marketers & Analysts]

Staring at this as I sipped my coffee stopped me dead.

Beside me I have two full pages of notes on what makes up the Web performance culture of company, and here is one of the most succinct points summed up for me in two short paragraphs.

Web performance is not just about tools and methodologies. Effective Web performance requires dedicated and trained human resources. And those people need to be able to work in a culture that values and understands the importance of Web performance to the business. Without a culture of Web performance, any tool, technology, and methodology purchased to make things better is useless.

In a previous post I touched on the question of whether an organization sees Web performance as a technology or business issue. Answering this question is key to understanding a company’s perspective on Web performance issues.

Start by asking Who is responsible for Web performance? at a company. Is there a cross-functional team that meets regularly to discuss current performance, long-term trends, the competitive landscape, effects on customer experience, and how performance concerns are shaping and guiding upcoming development efforts?

Or is Web performance a set of anonymous charts and tables that have no context ,originating from the inscrutable measurement system, bundled up into an executive report by an unnamed staff member for a once a month meeting?

Most companies understand Web performance is crucial. They understand it affects the bottom line and customer experience. They understand all of the ideas and concepts of Web performance. But like the proverbial horse and water, they don’t drink from the stream in front of them. They don’t drink because they are too busy watching for cougars, wolverines, and poachers. They have too much going on to make Web performance a priority.

Part of developing a strong culture of Web performance is creating a business culture that is customer-centric. When a company turns their perspective around and makes delighting the customer a part of everything they do, the customer experience on the Web becomes a critical component of the culture.

The key to making Web performance a part of a customer-centric culture is to shift Web performance discussions from the abstract (full of numbers and charts representing the potential of Web performance to affect customers) to the real (effect of Web performance on towns and cities and people and the bottom line). Attaching a name, a place, or a value to every number on a Web performance chart makes it easier for people in an organization to absorb the effect it has on them as an employee.

Moving the discussion about Web performance from the testing lab and NOC to the breakroom and the hallway takes a greater effort. It starts by making Web performance data available to all, not just those who are tasked with monitoring it.

A culture of Web performance means that the $90 you spent on people is supplemented by a team of avid amateurs who notice changes and trends that may slip through the cracks. These amateurs are encouraged to participate in Web performance discussions, where the experts are encouraged to listen then contribute.

Why listen to avid amateurs? In many cases, they are the people who work directly with customers and use the products on a daily basis. Their feedback comes from real experience, set alongside abstract values. Once a measurement has a story, it makes it easier to understand the problem.

An example of the success of amateurs is Wikipedia. A population of amateur contributors, as well as a core of experts in certain fields, have ensured that this is a useful resource. A Web performance culture full of avid amateurs allows comments and stories to flow from the customer-centric parts of an organization into the technology and business parts of the organization. These stories and inputs make the Web performance more real, and make a chart in a report more important.

A culture of Web performance is one that is adopted by an entire company. It is a way of examining the reality of a site in a way that is customer-centric and customer-driven. A strong Web performance culture absorbs information from many sources, and filters the data through a customer filter, and makes every measurement count.

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The moment a Web site goes live, the publishers lose control of the performance.

When I say lose control of the performance, I mean that despite everything that has been done to ensure scalability and capacity, the Web is inherently an infrastructure that is out of anyone’s direct ability to manage.

This is something that needs to be accepted. And while the datacenter is only that part of an application/infrastructure/network that can be directly managed by the Web site’s owners, a company has to accept that the real datacenter is the Internet. Not a datacenter that is on the Internet; the Internet as the datacenter.

Now that your head is spinning, let’s step back and consider this idea for a minute. The whole concept of the Internet being the datacenter makes operations and IT folks very uncomfortable. Why? There is no way for one company to manage the Internet. As a result, the general perspective is that the Internet can’t be trusted, and all that can be done is manage what can be managed directly.

Ignoring the Internet allows many organizations to leave the entire Internet out of their application or performance planning. They will measure and monitor, and they may even employ third-parties to help improve performance. When the shiny exterior is peeled back, it’s pretty clear that these organizations have built their entire performance culture on the assumption that if a problem exists on the Internet, there is nothing that can be done by them to fix it.

This may be effectively true. And it is not positive way to ensure effective Web performance

Having a what-if, emergency response plan in place is never a bad idea. If a problem appears on the Internet, and it affects your Web site, what are you going to do about it? Whine and moan and point fingers? Or take actions that effectively and clearly communicate to customers the steps you are taking to make things right?

Wait. Managing the Internet through customer communication?

I argue that besides working feverishly behind the scenes to resolve the problem, customer communication is the next most critical component of any Web performance issue management plan.

Web performance issue management plan. You have one, don’t you?

Well, when you get around to it, here are some concepts that should be built into the plan.

Effectively monitor your site

How can measurement and monitoring be part of issue management? Well, isn’t it always good policy to detect and begin investigating problems before your customers do?

Key to the measurement plan is monitoring the parts of your application that customers use. A homepage test will not give you vital information on issues with your authentication process, and is the same as saying the car starts, while ignoring the four flat tires.

If you aren’t effectively monitoring your site, your business is at risk.

Measure where the customers are

If your organization is focused on what it can control, then it will want to measure from locations that are controlled, and can provide stable, consistent, repeatable data.

Hate to break this to you, Sparky, but my Internet connection isn’t an OC-48 provisioned through a large carrier with a written SLA. Real people have provider networks that are congested, under-built, and deliver bandwidth using the old best effort approach.

Some customers may have given up on wires altogether, and access the site through wireless broadband or mobile devices.

Understand how your customers use your site. Then plan your response to managing the Internet from the outside-in.

Test with what your customers use

The greatest cop-out any Web site can make is Our site is best viewed using…

I’m sorry. This isn’t good enough.

Customers demand that your site work the way they want it to, not the other way around. If a customer wants to use Safari on a Mac, or Chromium on Linux, then understanding how the site performs and responds with these browsers is critical.

The one-browser/one-platform world no longer exists. If a large number of customers with one particular configuration indicate that they are having a problem with the new site, what is the proper reaction?

And why did this happen in the first place?

Monitor and respond to social media

No, this isn’t just here for buzzwords and SEO. In the last year, Twitter and Facebook have become the de-facto soapboxes for people who want to announce that their favorite site isn’t working. Wouldn’t hurt to monitor these sites for issues that might not be detected by traditional performance monitoring.

This approach means that you have to be willing to accept responsibility when something affects your site performance or availability, even if it isn’t your fault. No need to tell folks exactly what the problem is, but acknowledging that there is a legitimate issue that you recognize will go a long way toward making visitors/customers more understanding of the situation.

Get your message out effectively

Communicating about a performance issue means that the Marketing and PR teams will have to be brought in.

What? Marketing and Operations/IT working together? Yes. In a situation where there is a major outage or issue, Marketing will DEMAND to be involved. Wouldn’t it be easier if these two parts of the organization knew each other and a plan for responding to critical performance issues?

If Marketing understands the degree of the problem, what it will take to fix, and what is being done about it, they can craft a message that handles any question that might come in, while acknowledging that there is an issue.

A corollary to this: If there is an issue, don’t deny it exists. Denying a problem when it clear to anyone using the site that there is one is worse than saying nothing at all.

Takeaway

Practicing effective Web performance means a company understands that directly managing the Internet is impossible, but having a process to respond to Internet performance issues is critical. A Web performance incident plan shows that you understand that stuff happens on the Internet and you’re working on it.

Web performance is everywhere. People intuitively understand that when a site is slow, something’s wrong. Web performance breeds anecdotal tales of lost carts, broken catalogs, and searches gone wrong. Web performance can get you name in lights, but not in the way you or your company would like.

It’s a mistake to consider Web performance a technology problem. Web performance is really a business problem that has a technological solution.

Business problems have solutions that any mid-level executive can understand. A site that can’t handle the amount of traffic coming in requires tuning and optimization, not the firing of the current VP of Operations and a new marketing strategy.

Can you imagine the fate of the junior executive who suggested that a new marketing strategy was the solution to brick-and-mortar stores that are too small and crowded to handle the number of prospective customers (or former prospective customers) coming in the door?

Every Web performance event costs a company money, in the present and in the future. So when someone presents your company with the reality of your current Web performance, what is your response?

Some simple ideas for living with the reality that Web performance hurts business.

1. Be able to explain the issue to everyone in the company and to customers who ask. Gory details and technical mumbo-jumbo make people feel like there is something being hidden from them. Tell the truth, but make it clear what happened.
2. Do not blame anyone in public. A great way to look bad to everyone is to say that someone else caused the problem. Guess what? All that the people who visited your site during the problem will remember is that your site had the problem. Save frank discussions for behind closed doors.
3. Be able to explain to the company what the business cost was. While everyone is pointing fingers inside your company, remind them that the outage cost them $XX/minute. Of course, you can only tell them that if you know what that number is. Then gently remind everyone that this is what it cost the whole company.
4. Take real action. I don’t mean things like “We will be conducting an internal review of our processes to ensure that this is not repeated”. I mean things like listening and understanding what technology or business process failed and got you into this position in the first place. Was it someone just hitting the wrong switch? Or was it a culture of denial that did not allow the reality of Web performance to filter up to levels where real change could be implemented?
5. Demand quantitative proof that this will never happen again. Load test. Monitor. Measure. Correlate data from multiple sources. Decide how Web performance information will be communicated inside your company. Make the data available so people can ask questions. Be prepared to defend your decisions with real information.

The most successful Web companies have done thing very well. It is the core of their success and it is what makes them ruthlessly strive for Web performance excellence.

These companies understood that in order to succeed they needed to create a culture where business performance and Web performance are the same thing.

The hip new shiny thing for a new company is to position themselves as a service. Stepping back from the hype machine for a minute, can you really identify a service provider when you see one? Or are the companies that sell themselves as services are actually tools. And what differentiates a tool provider from a service provider?

A tool is designed to deliver a single unique function, such as a hammer or Twitter. Yes, Twitter is a tool. It is designed to take customer input in a variety of formats and from a number of sources and blast that content out to a variety of other formats and destinations.

Twitter is the tool. The items that feed into Twitter could be other tools (Tweetdeck as an example), or they could be true services, such as Ping.fm. What separates these two?

TweetDeck is a tool that feeds input into Twitter, and helps you manage output.

Ping.fm takes your input, and sends it where you what, modifying the format appropriately and hiding it all from you. It took the complexity of a problem (How do I post to multiple social media sites simultaneously?) and delivered a service solution, not a tool solution.

The problem with tool providers is that the problem, no matter what it is, always is a great for their tool. All customer problems fit neatly into the boundaries of what they know, and can be solved by what they sell. Tweetdeck’s answer to helping you with Twitter is to give you more Twitter your way. But it doesn’t extend or build on Twitter to create something that is truly new.

Solution providers look at the customer problem and see something new. The team at Ping.fm took a look at their personal social media management issues and found a way to create a social media input service. FriendFeed and FaceBook looked at the social media world and created a social media output service.

While tools are cool and shiny, they inevitable face the “Hammer v Screw” moment. The point when the tool reaches the outer ability of it’s ability to be useful.

Having many different hammers isn’t the solution. Heck, throwing in a wrench and a screwdriver isn’t the answer either. You’re still just selling tools.

When you step back and think about your business, when you consider what you deliver to your customers, can you really say that you deliver a service that extends and adds value to the tools you have at your disposal, that you are providing to your customers?

Or does everything just look like a nail?

Marketing has traditionally been a two-pronged attack on your mind and your wallet, designed to find the most effective ways to reach your mind, and get you to part with your money.

The techniques used to identify who to go after, how to go after them, and why this message will work drives a social media campaign as much as it does an old-school marketing campaign. The traditional layers in this model are targeting and messaging.

What is interesting is that the emergence of social media has turned a two-layer model into a three-layer model. The third layer has always been there, it just hasn’t been large enough to matter to anyone until the last 2-3 years.

The navel-gazing that is occurring in the social media marketing community is due to the rise of this third layer, the layer that is concerned with communicating.

This is not the communications that so many organizations confuse with branding. This is the communication that focuses on the best way to isolate conversations, identify engaged audiences, and participate in communities.

Targeting

The science of marketing lives here. Demographics are the foundation of the targeting phase of any marketing campaign. What does the market we are trying to reach look like?

In this area, Lookery and QuantCast provide organizations with the data they need to decide when and where there message should go.

Messaging

This is where the science becomes the visible. Advertising and branding create the message that portrays the product to the customers, using the information gathered in the targeting phase.

Advertising and branding are not the same thing. Branding is the overarching vision that a product wants to push to the world while advertising is the ephemeral visual and aural methods used to get the brand embedded in the consciousness of a population.

Communicating

The third, and most critical circle in this cycle is communication. It is the one that companies so often get wrong, and that is garnering such a great deal of interest now. I would argue that until recently, companies have not understood communication, preferring to try and shape communication remotely, using advertising and branding, rather than engaging in it directly.

An organization that actively engages in communication is one that has a willingness to walk out from behind the safety of its brand and its advertising and talk to customers. Participate in conversations. Shape communities that emerge either for or against the product.

This is what companies are having so much difficulty with.

Attention and Reputation

Communicating with clients is the smallest circle because so few companies are doing it at all, and those that do it find it so hard to get right. What organizations have found is that attempting to use communication in the same way they use their existing marketing tools leads to failure here.

Getting the attention of a population of key customers is a targeting and messaging success. Holding the attention of these customers doesn’t require new advertising and a constantly refreshed brand. The people who we listen to most have a reputation, have opinions we trust.

It will be interesting to watch the true evolution of Corporate Communication (Corporate Conversations?) circle evolve in the next few years.

One of the most challenging things in social media is finding the conversation leaders. Those people who drive the conversation, and create a community.

FriendFeedHolic (ffholic) has taken the base knowledge that exists in FriendFeed and added a ranking mechanism to it based on input and output. In fact, they weight the participation in the FriendFeed community more heavily than participation in other communities.

This is important. Although FriendFeedHolic is separate from FriendFeed, they have found the way to isolate and target those users who are most likely to participate and create conversations. These users, be it Scoble or Mona N, are where advertisers and marketers can target their money.

How would they do this?

Think about it. If someone that is a large commenter or conversation-creator on FriendFeed creates new content, they are assigned a higher ranking in the new conversation-driven ad-discovery model that advertisers will have to create to succeed.

This new targeted advertising logic will be forced to discover:

• The content of the conversation
• The context of the conversation
• The tone of the conversation
• The participants in the conversation

This model will be able to identify when it is an inward-facing conversation that involves mostly super-users, or if it is a conversation that engages a wide-spectrum of people.

Conversations among super-users will lead to more passive advertising being shown, as that is a spectator event, with only a few participants.

Conversations created by super-users, or that involve super-users, but have a higher participation from the general community will get more intelligent attention to ensure that the marketing messages and advertising shown fit the four criteria above.

In this new model, advertisers will have to see that they can’t simply slap a set of ads up on the popular kids web sites. They will have to understand who leads a community, who generates buzz, and who can engage the most people on a regular basis.

In this model, the leader has far less power than the community that they create. And maintain.

In previous posts about advertising and marketing to the new social media world [here and here], I postulated that it is very difficult to assign a value to a stream of comments, a community of followers, or a conversation.

As always, Google seems (to think) it has the answer. BusinessWeek reports the vague concept of PageRank for the People [here]. Matt Rhodes agrees with this idea, and that advertising will become more and more focused on the community, rather than on the content.

Where the real value in this discussion lies is in targeting the advertising to be relevant to the conversation. It’s not just matching the content. It’s all about making the advertising relevant to the context.

Is the tone of the conversation about the brand positive or negative? I like to point out that I see my articles about Gutter Helmet creating a content-match in the AdSense logic that drives this product to be advertised. What is lost in the logic that AdSense uses is that I am describing my extremely negative experience with Gutter Helmet.

Shouldn’t the competitors of Gutter Helmet be able to take advantage of this, based on the context of the article? Shouldn’t Gutter Helmet be trying to respond to these negative posts by monitoring the conversation and actively trying to turn a bad customer experience into a positive long-term relationship?

Conversation and community marketing is a far more complex problem than a modified PageRank algorithm. It is not about the number of connections, or the level of engagement. In the end, it is about ensuring that advertisers can target their shrinking marketing dollars at the conversations that are most important.

Injecting irrelevant content into conversation is not the way to succeed in this new approach. Being an active participant in the conversation is the key.

In effect, the old model that is based on the many eyeballs for the lowest cost approach is failing. A BuzzLogic model that examines conversations and encourages firms to intelligently and actively engage in them is the one that will win.

The road to success is based on engagement, not eyeballs.

There is clear dissatisfaction with the current state of marketing among the social media mavens.

• Fred Wilson and Union Square Ventures are looking for companies to invest in to take advantage of this.
• BuzzLogic releases their conversational ad service.
• The Inquisitr moves from AdSense to Technorati Media, indicating a potential shift at b5 Media.
• Lookery is providing demographic information that is relevant to social media providers and shaping ad presentation that way
• A completely off-the-radar person such as myself realizes that there is gold in what holds the attention, and that’s not always the latest and greatest

So what can be done? Jeff Jarvis points out that the problem lies with measurement. I agree, as there is only value in a system where all of the people involved agree on what the metric of record will be, and how it can be validly captured.

Currently CPM is the agreed upon metric. In a feed based online world, how does a CPM model work? And, most importantly, why would I continue to place your ads on my site if all your doing is advertising to people based on the words on the page, rather than who is looking at the page and how often that page is looked at.

In effect, advertisers should be the ones thrying to figure out how to get into the community, get into the conversation. As an advertiser, don’t you want to be where the action is? But how do you find an engaged audience in an online world that makes a sand castle on the beach in a hurricane look stable?

The challenge for advertisers is to be able to find the active communities and conversations effectively. The challenge for content creators and communities is to understand the value of their conversations, the interactions that people who visit the site have with the content.

In effect, a social media advertising model turns the current model on its head. Site owners and community creators gain the benefit of being attractive to advertisers because of the community, not because of the content. And site owners who understand who visits their site, what content most engages them, how they interact with the system will be able to reap the greatest rewards by selling their community as a marketable entity.

And Steven Hodson rounds out the week’s think on communities by throwing out the subversive idea that communities are not always free (as in ‘beer’, not as in ‘land of’). If a community has paid for the privilege of coming together to participate in communal events and discussions, then can’t that become an area for site owners to further control the cost of advertising on their site?

While the benefit of reduced or no marketing content is the benefit of many for-pay communities, this benefit can be used by site owners by saying that an advertiser can have access to the for-pay community at the cost of higher ad rates and smaller ads. The free community is a completely different set of rules, but there are also areas in the free community that are of higher value than others.

In summary, the current model is broken. But there is no way to measure the value of a Twitter stream, a FriendFeed conversation, a Disqus thread, or a Digg rampage. And until there is, we are stuck with an ad model that based on the words on the page, and not the community that created the words.

If you ask 15 different people what the phrase Web performance means to them, you will get 30 different answers. Like all things in this technological age, the definition is in the eye of the beholder. To the Marketing person, it is delivering content to the correct audience in a manner that converts visitors into customers. To the business leader, it is the ability of a Web site to deliver on a certain revenue goal, while managing costs and creating shareholder/investor value.

For IT audiences, the mere mention of the phrase will spark a debate that would frighten the UN Security Council. Is it the Network? The Web server? The designers? The application? What is making the Web site slow?

So, what is Web performance? It is everything mentioned above, and more. Working in this industry for nine years, I have heard all facets of the debate. And all of the above positions will appear in every organization with a Web site to varying degrees.

In this ongoing series, I will examine various facets of Web performance, from the statistical measures used to truly analyze Web performance data, to the concepts that drive the evolution of a company from “Hey, we really need to know how fast our Web page loads” to “We need to accurately correlate the performance of our site to traffic volumes and revenue generation”.

Defining Web performance is much harder than it seems. It’s simplest metrics are tied into the basic concepts of speed and success rate (availability). These concepts have been around a very long time, and are understood all the way up to the highest levels of any organization.

However, this very simple state is one that very few companies manage to evolve away from. It is the lowest common denominator in Web performance, and only provides a mere scraping of the data that is available within every company.

As a company evolves and matures in its view toward Web performance, the focus shifts away from the basic data, and begins to focus on the more abstract concepts of reliability and consistency. These force organizations to step away from the aggregated and simplistic approach of speed and availability, to a place where the user experience component of performance is factored into the equation.

After tackling consistency and reliability, the final step is toward performance optimization. This is a holistic approach to Web performance, a place where speed and availability data are only one component of an integrated whole. Companies at this strata are usually generating their own performance dashboards with combinations of data sources that correlate disparate data sources in a way that provides a clear and concise view not only of the performance of their Web site, but also of the health of their entire online business.

During this series, I will refer to data and information very frequently. In today’s world, even after nearly a decade of using Web performance tools and services, most firms only rely on data. All that matters is that the measurements arrive.

The smartest companies move to the next level and take that data and turn it into information, ideas that can shape the way that they design their Web site, service their customers, and view themselves against the entire population of Internet businesses.

This series will not be a technical HOWTO on making your site faster. I cover a lot of that ground in another of my Web sites. It will also not be data heavy; again, I point you to another of my Web sites if you want only the numbers.

What this series will do is lead you through the minefield of Web performance ideas, so that when you are asked what you think Web performance is, you can present the person asking the question with a clear, concise answer.

The next article in this series will focus on Web performance measures: why and when you use them, and how to present them to a non-technical audience.

Microsoft releases a new browser, and, of course, Live Search is the default search tool.

Google is pouting.Who do they think they are? Shut up and sit down.

New Microsoft Browser Raises Google’s Hackles

Microsoft, you have got me to say something that supports something you are doing. Ain’t viral marketing grand?

Now shut up and sit down.

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