Utility-Model Web Hosting? Sounds Great!

About a month ago, I was meeting with the ServInt Marketing team, discussing the fact that — while we have a relatively high proportion of customers who will shout from the mountaintops about how much they love us (thanks, guys!) — the vast majority of our customers are silent throughout the length of their stay with us.

This topic was top of mind for us because we were in the process of designing a full-time staff position dedicated to customer outreach and relationship management — and we were frankly wondering how useful such a position would be if, in fact, people didn’t really want to engage with their web host unless something went wrong.

We began contemplating the possibility that our customers see us the same way they see their electric utility — i.e., they only think of us when their service is interrupted, or when they open their bills each month.

From a marketing perspective – trying to build brand loyalty and attract new business through referrals – this may sound like a bad thing, but it doesn’t have to be.  It’s possible to offer a commodity service on a utility model and still have your customers love you — and one sector of the utility industry is particularly good at this.

The American rural electric utility industry is made up of about 1,000 electric cooperatives — small, non-profit, consumer-owned utilities that serve the needs of the 10% of Americans who live in areas largely beyond the reach of investor- or municipally-owned power companies.  Because these co-ops are owned by the households and businesses they serve, an extraordinarily high emphasis is placed on providing impeccable, personalized customer service.

These co-ops invest in community business development, constantly enhance their infrastructure with systemic upgrades, and — despite their small size — are frequently the first in the industry to deliver new technologies that lower costs for their customers.  The result is a peculiar anomaly in the business world:  these are regulated monopolies that enjoy fierce customer allegiance — utility companies that are actually loved and appreciated by their customers.

ServInt isn’t a cooperative.  But it turns out we operate a lot like one:  frequent, free infrastructure and service package upgrades, customer/community-centric decision making, personalized service geared towards making our customers’ businesses succeed — the similarities are striking.  And because of that, I’m not afraid of the similarities between us and the electric utility industry when it comes to customer engagement and feedback.  We love talking to our customers — but a healthy silence can be a good thing when it’s coupled with fierce loyalty.  Bottom line:  if it turns out that web hosting is seen as a utility-grade service these days, at least I know we’ve modeled our business after the right segment of that industry.

Photo by ykanazawa1999

Hosting for the Holidays

With the holidays upon us, I thought I’d step back a moment from our insight-heavy “actionable intelligence” and ponder the season and our place in it.

The holidays are a busy time for all of us. Whether it’s buying presents and visiting relatives, or getting those end-of-year projects complete at home and at work, it’s definitely a time of high stress and manic energy.

But in the midst of the holiday shopping season with its black Fridays and no payments until the new year, the spirit of the season can get lost pretty quick.

That’s why I’m so happy to be working in an industry that doesn’t have to capitalize on the season the way so many businesses must. Hosting is not an impulse buy. It’s a long, thoughtful decision process—especially at the high end of the hosting market where ServInt lives. So, no matter what time of year it is, buy-now short-term advertising gimmickry really has a very small potential impact on our sales. And that’s not the kind of company we are anyway. Read more

Customer Service Series, Part 5: Exceeding Customer Expectations is Stupid

I just got done reading an excellent blog post by Dan Palotta on the Harvard Business Review site.  It’s called “I Don’t Understand What Anyone Is Saying Anymore,” and if you’re a lover of words — by which I mean, if you love words enough to care about them and hate seeing them being abused — you’ll definitely want to give it a read.

There was a lot of gold in Dan’s post, but the section that resonated most with me was the following:

Another term that has lost its meaning is “Let’s exceed the customer’s expectations.” Employees who hear it just leave the pep rally, inhabit some kind of temporary dazed intensity, and then go back to doing things exactly the way they did before the speech. Customers almost universally never experience their expectations being met, much less exceeded. How can you exceed the customer’s expectations if you have no idea what those expectations are? I was at a Hilton a few weeks ago. They had taken this absurdity to its logical end. There was a huge sign in the lobby that said, “Our goal is to exceed the customer’s expectation.” The best way to start would be to take down that bullshit sign that just reminds me, as a customer, how cosmic the gap is between what businesses say and what they do. My expectation is not to have signs around that tell me you want to exceed my expectations.

I admit that the marketing function, of which I am the titular head around these parts, only has a tangential relationship with the process of delivering “customer service.”  But there is one area where we have a measurable impact on the customer experience, and that’s in the area of the things we say and the words we use to say them. Read more

The Power of Social Media, or Do You Give a $#!% About Your Web Host?

If you follow ServInt on Twitter, you may have noticed a strange surge in profanity-laced tweeting coming from us and many of your fellow customers—and you may have wondered, what the $%#@! is going on here?

The honest answer is, we’re not entirely sure yet.

Let me explain. About a month ago, I was in a meeting with the ServInt Marketing team, discussing the fact that—while we have a relatively high proportion of customers who will shout from the mountaintops about how much they love us (thanks, guys!)—the vast majority of our customers are silent throughout the length of their stay with us as customers.

This topic was top of mind for us because we were in the process of designing a full-time staff position dedicated to customer outreach and relationship management, and we were frankly wondering how useful such a position would be if, in fact, people didn’t really want to engage with their web host unless something went wrong.

In any case, as we sat there contemplating the depressing possibility that our customers might actually see hosting like they see the electric company (i.e.: the only time you think about the electric company is when the lights go out) somebody blurted out:  “What we really need to know is, does anybody actually give a $#!% about their web host?” There was a burst of laughter, but in the silence that followed somebody said, “We should just ask them.”

Read more

Thinking of Building a New Web Site?

Today, as you may have noticed, ServInt unveiled a brand-new web site — one that we hope will be easier to use, more pleasing to the eye and more valuable to our customers and prospects.

The deployment of our new web site, in and of itself, is probably of modest importance to readers of the ServInt Source. But it occurred to me that sharing details of why and how it was built might be useful, as the challenges we faced before and during the redesign are fairly common ones. So, following are some thoughts, observations, and rules of thumb that may be of use to you:

1. When your customers tell you it’s time for a change, it’s definitely time for a change. Face it: the attractiveness and usefulness of your web site is way down the list of priorities for your customers — so when they take the time to tell you it looks out of date, or is hard to use, it’s probably a bigger problem than you think it is.
2. Building a brand-new web site takes less work than propping up the old one. This one may seem hard to believe, since there is no doubt that the process of building a brand-new web site takes a lot of time and effort. But when you measure both the extra work your company has to undertake on a day-to-day basis to make up for your site’s lack of effectiveness and the big-picture process issues you can fix by implementing a new web site, the value proposition becomes crystal-clear. Bottom line: it’s worth it.
3. Make your web site a mirror facing outwards, as well as inwards. It’s tempting to see your web site solely as a reflection of who you are, or perhaps who you wish you could be. It’s just as important for your web site to accurately reflect who your customers are. Your prospective and current customers need to feel like they’ve arrived at their online home when they arrive at your site — a place where they’re understood and appreciated. Our customer base skews very heavily towards “value purchasers” — people who don’t have time for marketing fluff. That’s why our site was designed with a visibly minimalist style. Our overarching goal was to provide an extremely efficient path towards the information our customers seek.
4. Show, don’t tell. ServInt is fortunate to have a loyal customer base that is willing to tell the world how much they like us, and why. If your customers are similarly willing to compliment you in public — let them. A basic rule of thumb is: if your customers are willing to say nice things about you, there’s no need for you to say those things yourself!
5. Pick a designer who understands you. As mentioned before, we had a clear mental image of what this site was supposed to look like before we started building it. We actively searched for designers who understood the minimalist aesthetic we were after, and why we were seeking it. When we found them, we were able to set them loose to do what they do best. This made things much easier than simply “buying talent” and arguing with them over The Vision Thing. When you and your designer clearly understand the brand strategy you have in mind, as well as the design style that’s going to get you there, you can step back and let them do their job.

We hope you like it!

Cloud Hosting Series, Part 1: A Marketer’s Perspective

 

A few weeks ago, I traveled to San Jose, CA, where I attended the “Cloud Connect” conference. Cloud Connect is basically an annual symposium where the biggest players in the cloud industry gather together to talk about what’s coming next for the Cloud. Analysts opine, accountants report, Fortune 500 CTOs brag, consultants take notes, and those of us who are already deep in the trenches of the virtualized data center industry scratch our heads and wonder how any of this applies to “ordinary” businesses.

In later blog posts, our engineering and operations guys will get into the technical/management nitty-gritty of Cloud hosting. For now, I just want to share the following summary of what I learned at Cloud Connect, which I hope will set the stage for some of their comments:

1. Extremely large enterprises are now getting very serious about the cloud. What was a buzz phrase last year has turned into a real storage/processing/hosting option for some of America’s largest companies.
2. These companies don’t know how to approach the cloud. Should they go with a “private cloud” — i.e., a virtualized private platform that ensures security, but provides little to no economic benefit? A “hybrid” platform, where they keep certain apps and data behind lock and key, and burst out to the cloud only when necessary? Or should they go whole-hog and move everything to companies like Amazon? Most seem somewhat paralyzed by the choice.
3. The real adoption of cloud — even in the Fortune 500 universe — is still very modest.
4. Having said that, enough hyper-enterprises have moved into the cloud for industry bean-counters to be able to analyze some real data about computing resource efficiencies at those companies. This data has led analysts to conclude that at the enterprise level, cloud savings are very real, and can be very, very significant.
5. There are dozens of clever startups that are trying to turn the generic, SMB-hostile resource platforms offered by today’s cloud companies into more useful products. In my opinion, where these companies are succeeding, they’re offering only partial solutions to huge macro-level problems — and you still have to be an extreme early adopter to make sense of them.

So that’s the story as far as generic cloud services are concerned.  Much of the same story applies to companies that are marketing hosting “in the cloud.”  For the most part, they’re targeting their services at customers with the ability to take a bare-bones, science-project technology and develop it to meet their specific needs. That means hyper-enterprises with seven-figure IT budgets and early adopters eager to take a whack at a new, unproven platform. If you’re not one of those companies, good luck finding a cloud hosting solution that works for you “right out of the box.”

I’m a marketing guy, so I generally tend to be one of those “glass-is-half-full” people. For now, though, that’s my honest assessment of the current state of the Cloud in general, and Cloud hosting in particular.

Next week in part 2 of our Cloud Series: “From VPS to Cloud? Redefining Hosting” by ServInt CTO Matt Loschert.

 

Photo by Liber

Black Hats, White Hats: SEO and JC Penney

A good friend of mine who works for a search engine giant that will not be named tipped me off to two very interesting articles about search engine optimization.  The first is a fascinating New York Times expose (requires registration) of “black hat” SEO tactics used by J.C. Penney to goose their Google search rankings during the recent holiday season. The second is from the popular SEO blog yourseosucks.com, and makes for some very interesting reading as well.

I’ll be honest with you — this story makes me glad that ServInt spends most of its energy building an honest, organic buzz from satisfied customers, rather than manipulating search engine results to make sure we pop up at the top of every Google search. That doesn’t mean we don’t think “white hat” SEO isn’t valuable, or that we shouldn’t always be certain that our web strategy maximizes our search engine opportunities. But I can’t help feeling that the best form of SEO — and I mean that literally — is delivering a product that is so superior that your customers will eagerly spread the word about you online. The question is: how can SEO take maximum advantage of that?

If you’re an SEO expert, I’d be curious to get your thoughts on this. Was the JC Penney event a watershed for the SEO industry? Am I right about old-school “word of mouth” being the best form of SEO? Is there a way to combine killer word-of-mouth buzz with killer SEO strategies? I bet you’ve got some thoughts here, and I really want to hear them. The most compelling insight gets a free round-trip airplane ticket to meet with me in McLean, VA, where we can really discuss things in detail.

Photo by arbyreed

The more things change, the more they should stay the same. Sometimes.

My name is Fritz Stolzenbach, and I’ve been leading marketing and business development efforts at telecom/Internet industry companies like Intelsat, Hughes Network Systems and the National Rural Telecommunications Cooperative for more than 25 years.

I’ve been integrally involved in the rollout of some pretty cool broadband/rich media products and services over the years, including DIRECTV, HughesNet and the Connexstar enterprise WAN service. I’ve launched dozens of B2B, B2C and Fortune 500-facing products and services in my career, and I’ve run more than a few companies of my own.

Now, I’m starting a new chapter in my professional life, as the Vice President of Marketing at ServInt.

So why am I here? Basically, I’m here at ServInt because I love this company. The people who work here are smart, love what they do, and are easy to work with. But probably the biggest reason why I decided to join ServInt is because I think this company is about to change the face of business-grade web hosting — again. I know this because I’ve spent a lot of time with the mad scientists in the engineering department, the guys on the front lines in the MST — and I’ve had some very long, very interesting conversations with the people who sit in the corner offices here. Bottom line: amazing things are going to be happening at ServInt over the coming months and years, and I want to be a part of them.

One of my priorities is to keep you up to date on the latest developments in the Marketing and Business Development department — so you’ll be hearing more from me as my tenure at ServInt unfolds. Our to-do list is pretty straightforward.

1. We’re going to help design products that meet urgent, real-world requirements of the global business community.
2. We’re going to forge new strategic relationships with companies who can help us deliver the best possible products and services to our customers.
3. We’re going to market and promote our products and services aggressively, but truthfully and with integrity.

In short, we’re going to do everything we can to help this remarkable company reach its fullest potential, while staying true to its roots.

Now — I want to address something that may be on the minds of folks who like things just the way they are. I know that for some service companies, growth can be the kiss of death — and growth is at the core of my job; it’s what I do. Let me assure you that everybody at the executive level in this company is in total agreement: we will not pursue market growth at the expense of service quality. Period.

From my perspective, ServInt’s great market differentiator is the personalized, high-touch service it provides its customers. Losing that advantage would cut my marketing and business development efforts off at the knees — and I can’t afford that. So, don’t worry — nothing will change about the level of service you’re used to receiving from us. We want to grow, and (with your help) we’re going to grow quickly. But, in the ways that are most important to us — the ways that define us as a high-quality customer-care enterprise — we’re going to remain exactly the same.

Does Online Advertising Work?

Just about every company worth its salt has some sort of online advertising component as part of its marketing budget. With the ubiquity and ease of use of platforms such as Google’s Adwords and Facebook ads, online marketing has truly become an accessible avenue for a lot of novice advertisers.

But there’s another question that has nagged advertisers in all mediums for as long as there has been marketing, does it work?

Online advertising, whether it’s in the form of a banner ad or text ad, seems inherently impersonal. You’re creating and placing ads that are viewed by nameless, faceless people who could literally be anywhere in the world…the task to reach them seems daunting doesn’t it?

What a lot of people forget is that this is exactly the same with all advertising, regardless of the medium. You don’t really know who’s looking at an ad on a billboard, or who is listening to the radio, or who is watching your commercial on television. Sure, there are demographic studies you could perform that could help you make intelligent guesses, but the truth is that data is useless if your product has a narrow or hyper-competitive market. In this respect webhosting is an excellent example, as costs per click (CPC’s) for popular keywords in our industry regularly hit the $25 mark in Google Adwords, the most popular ad network online by far.

comScore, a tech marketing analytics firm and a great source of genuinely interesting internet marketing info has performed a spate of studies recently that bring up some great points on this very topic.

In August, the firm released the findings of a study it conducted with dunnhumbyUSA that focused on the difference between television and online advertising. You can checkout a detailed press release about the study here, but I’ll do my best to summarize the findings.

The two firms used the example of consumer packaged goods, things such as food and snacks, to test whether online advertising actually worked. By tracking the buying habits of thousands of shoppers using their supermarket discount cards the firm was able to obtain fascinating, and to some extent unexpected results.

The study found that, in a sample size of roughly 200,000 shoppers, the brands who were exposed to consumers via ads on the web saw a 9% sales lift over a three month period with 80% of the campaigns showing a statistical increase. Those exposed through television ads saw an 8% sales lift over twelve months with only 36% of the campaigns showing a statistical increase. This is staggering data, it means nearly 1 in 10 consumers will change their buying habits in the affirmative after being exposed to an ad online and in a very short amount of time as well.

Of course, there are plenty of things to take issue with, the study doesn’t comment on the frequency of ad delivery or what percentage of ads were static vs flash, but it does at least validate the concerns of many advertisers out there.

What’s your take on the status quo in online advertising? Let us know in the comments, on our Facebook page, and on Twitter.

Photo by kevindooley.