‘Twas The Week Before Christmas [The Digital Marketing Version]

‘Twas the week before Christmas, and all through the marketing team,

Every person was busy, a few ready to scream.

The landing pages were published to the website with care,

In hopes that buyers soon would be there.

The analysts had their noses to their computer screens,

While visions of high conversion ratios danced in their dreams.

Our VP and me had our Salesforce dashboards in view;

I think he wanted to leave, and, to be honest, I did too.

When out of the server room there arose such a clatter,

I raced to my cube to see what was the matter.

Opening new windows, I typed with a flash,

Pulled up the website and command line to Ping in a dash.

The slow response of the recently published pages

Gave the impression I might be losing my wages.

When, what to my searching eyes should appear,

A 404 message that brought me to tears.

All of a sudden, so breathless and gasping,

Our lead developer showed up; I began gagging.

More rapid than any language I could understand,

He wove a tale of how the hacker got in.

“They tore down the firewall, they bypassed the encryption,

They stole all our data and won’t let us back in.

We don’t know what to do, it’s the height of the season,

If we don’t fix this soon, we’ll lose our jobs, it stands to reason.”

Well, we kicked out the hackers and tracked them down, too

We deleted the data, that they were going to use.

The web server was restored and transactions renewed

Our jobs were saved and our conversion rates flew!

Our bounce rates were great and our Likes were high, too

And we watched Google Analytics in real-time as our sales numbers grew.

Things were finally settling down and the website was stable,

My third Mountain Dew was gone and I was tired of stale bagels.

So we ordered 12 pizzas and the team hungrily dug in,

We were ready for a break, exhausted and generally stretched thin.

At last, the programmers prepared for a long game of Warcraft.

While the email and SEM teams pulled up the latest LOLCats.

The project manager threatened to call a meeting,

But the looks we gave him were close to a beating.

The long shopping season was finally coming to a close,

I think we’ve been here three days in these same clothes.

The VP had left long ago without saying a word,

He did leave us some chocolate; yeah, he’s a turd.

After looking around, I saw our work was done,

For this season, at least, no more campaigns needed to run.

So I sprang out of my cube and gave the team a high five

I went down the elevator, I was ready to drive.

But as I approached my car, I’m sure somebody heard,

“I left my keys at my desk!” as I grumbly returned.

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About the author

Contributor

John Paul Mains

John Paul Mains is Click Laboratory's Chief Scientist, where he leads the company's engagement and optimization teams. He has 20 years of experience in web design, online marketing, customer analysis and lead generation.