You Can Learn a Lot from the Super Bowl

Every year it seems, one of the Super Bowl advertisers does something to give us all great small business lessons. Yesterday’s game was no different.

84 Lumber was yesterday’s teacher, sending millions of people to a website to watch the end of their controversial commercial, only to have the website crash. If ever there was an avoidable problem, this is it. You know you have to be prepared for an incredible rush of traffic when you’re advertising on the Super Bowl, regardless of how compelling your call-to-action is.

While the site crash was apparently temporary and the social media responses on Twitter and other channels directed people to its YouTube channel to see the end of the spot, which was designed to move people from the Super Bowl broadcast to 84 Lumber’s website, the technology goof was the unfortunate winner of the night’s buzz.

The case study underlines the importance of you online presence in todays always-on, digital consumer environment. Whether you hold up a sign and say “visit our website now” like 84 Lumber did or you don’t ever direct people there, today’s consumer will go looking for it anyway. If you don’t take care of that need — by having a useful website, hopefully with one that drives potential customers to give you their contact information — you may be missing out on as many chances to make a connection in a year as 84 Lumber did in one night.

One of your small business lessons is to have a website. Make sure it’s useful. Make sure when customers go there, they are given a reason to let you know they were there and ask for more information.

Then, do something like 84 Lumber did to drive people there. Only be smarter and make sure you can keep the lights on in case the reason drives more people than you may have guessed. Call or email your website hosting service and ask about allocating more resources to ensure the site remains up for an influx of traffic. You may have to pay a little more to add the resources, but that costs a lot less than what 84 Lumber is paying now in bad PR.

Do you have a downed website mishap to tell of? What lessons did you learn? How did you solve the problem? The comments are yours.