Captain, she's going to blow!

Ever feel like you have so much on that you wake up in the wee hours in a cold sweat? Do you find yourself arriving at work exhausted just thinking about your ‘to do list’?

Over capacity? Don’t worry, you are in good company.

Twitter has been plagued this week by ‘over capacity of tweets’. For those of you not akin to Twitter, in a nutshell; too many people are trying to use their service at the same time. This is possibly due to some little world sporting event called the World Cup being played at the moment....

But what a nice place to be in. Your service is being used SO much that it temporarily keeps going down. What business wouldn’t want to be in this position?

Now, some would say, that it’s bad planning and that the geeks technical genius’ at Twitter should have foreseen this and increased capacity. Well, perhaps they should have, but being on such a worldwide scale, I guess it is hard to keep up.

ITV marketing department however, should hang their heads in shame about their preparation for the World Cup. They are sharing coverage with the BBC and had lucked out on getting the rights to the opening ceremony and first match screening rights. Now, being held on a Friday afternoon, I think even my four year old niece could have predicted that one of their largest audiences would be those working in their offices and wanting to watch the first match at 3pm on a Friday afternoon.

Unfortunately my niece doesn’t work for ITV and so they were therefore caught out when their online service crashed about 10mins into the first match due to ‘over capacity’. But don’t worry, that was soon forgotten when they switched off their HD service less than 4 minutes into the first England match and over 1.5million England fans watched Gerrard score England’s first (and let’s hope not last) goal of the tournament.

I’m guessing that the ITV Head of Marketing is not having the best of weeks.

Some things you can plan for, other times you simply need a hand when the workload just gets too much and you physically cannot do everything yourself. (Please be warned that the following paragraph is a shameless plug).

If you need a hand with marketing and communications but you don’t have the resources or budget to hire someone full time, ever thought about hiring a marketing professional on a project or retained basis? I’ve been working for a retained client, cfes Ltd www.cfes.co.uk since March, providing them with PR & Marketing work for 16 hours each week. So far, I’ve worked on several marketing and sales promotions for them, I’m in the midst of rejuvenating their website copy, delivered new company literature, got some trade PR branding and worked with them on sales pitches and presentations. Hopefully they’ll agree that my 16 hours a week is working for them.

(OK, shameless plug over, you can come out from behind the sofa)

It has been a week of mailshot’s in the world of Zzing this week though. I’ve been getting out a dental construction / decontamination mailer out for cfes this week along with preparing another one for them on air conditioning. Then there have been my own Zzing mailers which I’ve been steadily getting out. Fingers crossed they get some results as direct mail still gets a really good response even in this day and age of technology – I guess most people get so many emails every day that they are more likely to read a mailer when it comes in the post than an email in most circumstances.

Hope you all enjoy the rest of the world cup, let’s hope the ITV coverage gets better anyway! I’m going to miss England’s next game as I’m attending a “decontamination in dental practices” conference in Loughborough – yes, the world of marketing is all about lunches, press launches and decontamination seminars.

Happy Fathers Day to all those Dad’s out there too (and a timely reminder for those of you who may have forgotten that it’s this Sunday!)

Until next time....