Marketing Sherpa Apologizes As Servers Overwhelmed With Blog Award Voters

It's nice to win recognition for your work. It impresses your parents, and your potential advertisers, and mainstream media who are always trying to find a blogger to interview. But many award program are bogus, or just poorly produced, and Marketing Sherpa Blog Awards has fallen into the second category. MarketingSherpa publisher Anne Holland has issued an apology because they underestimated the number of people who would vote in their blog awards this year.

Holland's email said: Here's a new link for folks who could not get in: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=803032287919

Holland emailed subscribers:

"We're sorry. We completely failed to anticipate the massive volume of voters for this year's vote. Last year just under 10,000 people visited the voting form. This year our visits topped six-figures in less than a day.

Although our normal site servers can handle that load easily, the tech we chose to power the voting form could not. They slowed, they crashed, etc. ...But, this morning we decided to switch over to another service. This service has loads more servers and should be able to handle the traffic. If they can't, please be patient and try again."

Don't get me wrong: I'm honored to be nominated. I'd love to win. But dozens of people emailed me to say the site wouldn't let them vote. Holland's email says they now "should be able to handle the traffic." Having handled situations where millions of people were accessing a server, I know that you can in fact plan for the traffic by purchasing flexible amounts of bandwidth. That's better than hoping it will all work out.

There also is no prominent link from MarketingSherpa's home page to the awards. That would be a good thing to add at this point. So would a "vote for me" code to put on the nominated blogs like the one provided by Battle of the Blogs and others.

And, as we noted the other day, people still can vote more than once. That basically hands the awards to bloggers who work for agencies where all employees can be asked to vote for them.

Click here to vote again, and again, and again, and again.

Comments

Posted by: marketing-blog.biz at June 25, 2006 12:27 PM

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