Gawkwire: Web Hosting and Internet News Resource

Website Hosting and Volcanoes

2010-04-28T22:27:00-04:00

(WebHost Blog) Unless you’ve been living under a rock somewhere you probably heard about that volcano in Iceland that has wreaked havoc with air travel across Europe since mid-April when it erupted. It happens to be called the Eyjafjallajokull volcano (please don’t ask me to pronounce that though). If you haven’t seen photos of the eruption, you should definitely check out these photos of the volcano. It seems that the ash can enter the intakes of jet engines and cause them to fail. In checking up with a few hosting companies across the pond I heard from them that the volcano actually had a significant effect on website hosting in Europe as well. Here are the reasons why.

Reason Number 1: People aren’t buying web hosting when they are stuck in an airport in another country or city for a week.

Although you might not think that the number of travelers impacted by the complete shutdown of airline travel across the whole of northern Europe would be include a large subset of hosting buyers, the numbers argue otherwise. According to published reports, a total of more than 100,000 flights were canceled outright and the affected airlines are on track to lose more than $2 billion. So that’s 100,00 flights with a few hundred passengers each – you do the math. Therefore, none of those people were buying web hosting during that period, which generally lowered hosting sales for the time of the flight cancellations.

Reason Number 2: Businesses were scrambling to get their people back in their own city.

Compounding the problem of actual travelers
seeking transportation was the issue that businesses now had key people out of the office for overly-extended and unplanned periods. Those left in the office were also often involved in helping arrange accommodations or alternate travel for the stuck passengers. That means that they too weren’t conducting business as usual. This further reduced the web hosting buyers pool during the airline shutdown.

Reason Number 3: Web hosting companies buy servers, routers and switches that are flown in from other cities.

Web hosting companies were also impacted by the disruption in the supply chain for key equipment needed in fast growing hosting environments. For example, Dell has a large manufacturing facility in Ireland. Those servers are generally flown around the UK and into northern Europe as well. It wasn’t just commercial aircraft that were grounded – cargo planes were also halted. UK website hosting company 34SP.com purchases part of its inventory from the Dell factory. The company had recently stocked up on server inventory, but was monitoring the situation in case a need arose for alternative server supplies. While the flight disruptions didn’t last quite long enough to put the true hurt on hosting operations, or to cause prices to go up for available servers – a few more days or weeks of no inventory would have cost hosting firms real money. The Wall Street Journal wrote a piece about these supply chain disruptions for small businesses as well.

In the end, things returned to normal fairly quickly. This is great news for travelers and also the web hosting companies in Europe. Don’t get complacent though – the Eyjafjallajokull volcano could easily spring back to full eruption at any time. Plus, there are many other volcanoes out there that can produce world changing eruptions at any moment. Here’s a photo summary of a few of these actively erupting or recently erupting volcanoes on our planet. You may want to stock up on a few extra servers if you live near any of these volcanoes – just in case.

http://www.gawkwire.com/web_hosting/website_hosting_and_volcanoes.html

Advertising, as we know it, needs to evolve.

2010-04-26T16:22:00-04:00

(Gawkwire.com) The next evolution of advertising is social network advertising. There are numerous forms of social advertising from targeted banners and deals, to members displaying product recommendations with buy now links, to adding cookies into a user’s system that track their actions across a Web site’s communities listing every subject they are interested in and serving them advertising based on their likes. These can all be considered passive forms of advertising. Active forms include setting up a company account on some place like Facebook or MySpace and actively engaging the community to participate.

In passive advertising, the goal is to get clicks and then get conversions. With active advertising, the goal is to build a relationship with your potential customers and community and get people to advertise your products and services of their own accord.

The core of social advertising depends on building a level of trust between business and the customer. This trust then allows interaction between the two, in one form or another, to build a personal relationship. Once a personal relationship is established, the customer buys the product. If the customer is happy with the product, they then recommend the product within their network and the cycle starts over again with more customers.

The Good
If the product turns out to be everything the company says it is, it will be disseminate throughout the customer’s network rapidly. Many users of social networks also participate on forums, chat rooms, and the like. Gaining a fanatical customer base gives the company product evangelists who descend on these discussion groups amass. What started as a simple ad campaign, can quickly take hold of an active user base thereby making your campaign viral. Those who dare question the product get ridiculed in a way that would make the average user of Digg blush. At least that is what all the reading material says.

The Bad
Unfortunately, social network advertising is a double-edged sword. If the customer hates the product and believes that the company hoodwinked them, then all hell will break loose. Pretty much take what was said under The Good and throw it in reverse. Instead of recommendations the purveyor of social greatness tells their friends to shun the company and to tell everyone they know about how evil, manipulative, and horrid that company is. Those who speak up about how much they like a product get pummeled with accusations of being an affiliate of said company in disguise. The money spent on the ads not only yields very few customers, but launching a Web driven smear campaign.

The Ugly
eMarketer (www.eMarketer.com an e-business and online marketing research firm) released a study on the potential advertising dollars that will be spent on social networks. It estimated that worldwide spending could reach $2.5 billion by 2010 and $1.8 billion in the US alone. That is a ton of potential competition. As mentioned earlier, social network ads range from simple flyers currently being sold on Facebook to more intrusive ad banners that are set to a Web surfer’s tastes. The former is targeted based on what categories a user joined while the latter goes through a user’s personal profile and scans for the user’s interests. Some social network sites are also looking at ways of searching a user’s browser history and using the sites they previously visited as a means of finding out what the user is looking for.
What many privacy groups consider a gross breach of privacy and net etiquette could be the new rule. The major question many are pondering now is what rights does the user have when it comes to their personal information. While some are now offering opt out clauses, others, like MySpace, are holding their users’ information hostage for the ability to make more ad dollars.

Social Advertising and You
Marketing with social networks is nothing new. The principles that make social advertising work are the same principles used to perpetuate a pro-active sales campaign:

1. You must be truthful in all things. Social networks are, well… social. With multiple people talking to each other, analyzing what you say and what you do, lies can be found quite easily and will come back to haunt you.

2. If you don’t have what the customer is looking for, introduce them to another company who can make it happen. This will be explained later, but for now think of it as a little advertising for the competition will net you some influence when the user tells their friends about their wonderful experience with your company.

3. Building a rapport with the potential customer is better than making the sale. Social advertising is hard work. It takes a lot to be active on numerous social networks and to gain a reputation there for being not only an expert, but also as a trusted source of services and products. If all you are interested in is a sale or the bottom line then you will have your eye on the wrong goal and may rush a sale before it is time.

4. Never disparage your competition. It shows a lack of professionalism. By slandering your competition to a customer, you signal to them that your service isn’t good enough to go toe to toe.

5. Avoid sales jargon and be direct in your communication. Sales pitches are becoming more and more worthless as time goes on. The human mind can only store so much and when it is inundated with tons of useless sales information it will tune it all out. Instead of using catch phrases and witticisms, use common language that establishes why your service or product will fulfill a need of the customer.

6. Make the customer feel good about themselves and their decision whether it is to buy from you or not. Just because you did not make the sales this time around does not mean the customer will have no future need for you. Building client customer relationships through social networks is a long process. No sense in wasting all that time by ending things if they decide not to buy.

7. Never put yourself in a position to take away from your customers. A good sale is mutually beneficial to both parties. An agreement will only last as long as both sides are happy. You may say, Dave how is this possible in Web Hosting? It is true computers and networks fail, downtime can never truly be eradicated, however if you have an outage you are taking away from your customer, so give them something to fill in the gap. Common knowledge is giving them money back in some form. I have never been a fan of common knowledge. Give them peace of mind as well as money. Let them know what you are doing to resolve the problem, how you will prevent it in the future, and keep them updated at all times.

8. Finally, respect your customer and they will respect you. This is a catch in all things you plan on doing with your ad campaign. If your target audience doesn’t like spam, then don’t send any. If your audience doesn’t like being inundated with ads that embed sounds or music, then don’t use it. When talking with a customer do not be quick to assume you know all of the answers. Listen to them and their needs. If they have a problem with your service do not be quick to defend your service, instead ask them why and if there is a way that it can be fixed. Social networks cannot only be used to sell, but can be used as a free means of understanding what the customers want and how they want services to be delivered.

More than in any other form of advertising a social network campaign MUST be truthful. If you are not truthful you will get a mob of angry people attacking your headquarters with pitchforks and torches annihilating any chance you have of becoming truly successful. The Internet has a long memory and just about everything is preserved for posterity. Customers that complained years ago will come back to haunt you again and again. If you want practical examples of this, spend a few hours on WebHostingTalk and you will see what I mean.

If you want an excellent example on how to run your would-be social networking campaign, then take a page from the Progressive Auto Insurance playbook. Progressive found a way to make even loosing battles win the war. Whether a customer buys from Progressive or buys from a competitor they will all be equally happy that Progressive looked out for their best interests. They will tell their friends that if they are looking for a car insurance provider they should just go to Progressive. Progressive gets an influx of visitors who use their tools. They will either buy from Progressive or not. Either way they will tell their friends about Progressive. Don’t take my word for it though, check the numbers. The online comparison rate campaign started in 1996. Between the years of 1996 and 2005, Progressive grew by an average of 17 percent each year. In more sizeable numbers, Progressive made $3.4 billion in 1996 and $14 billion in 2005. Honesty and truth are valuable commodities.

Avenues of Approach or How to Make it Work
For brevity’s sake, I am going to assume that most of you already understand banner campaigns and so forth. I will be dealing mostly with getting your message out through active marketing, mainly because there is a lot less information out there on it. Do note that a successful ad campaign uses multiple venues to maximize your target audience, provides banners with a message that is targeted at the site’s audience, is in the active voice to cause action in the audience, and above all, is not annoying. If I see another Swat the Mosquito banner I am going to cry.

Actively participating in a social network is normally free. However, like most free advertising it requires time. Each social network be it Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, WikiHow, or Yahoo! Answers, all have different ways of grabbing the attention of the users. I am going to do a quick rundown of the most popular sites and the fastest way to develop a marketing campaign that will showcase how best to use each.

Facebook
Like nearly every social site now, Facebook’s links all have the no-follow tag (search engines spiders will not follow the link) so don’t be surprised that this site will not increase your search engine statistics. Facebook is also a closed, “gated” community, so any flyers you use or advertising or conversations done will not be searchable via Google or Yahoo.

Spend some time building your company profile. You are going to want to keep this handy because you will be adding it to a lot of sites. The company profile is the basest of activities and will be used when users check out your posts or groups you have sponsored and want to know more about you.
With Facebook you are going to want to get active in sponsoring groups on say Web Hosting or Development. Spend some time building up your micro community and it can pay off. After you have a good crowd of people who are interested in what you do sponsor events such as classes on Web Development or making mini-conferences on what the users want in a Host. It will give you good public relations as well as some good demographic information and it’s free. If you have forums on your own site promote your events and your Facebook group to them to get additional members.

MySpace
MySpace is a challenge to get working well. In fact, MySpace’s audience is such that it might be best just to stay away for now. Niche markets might be fruitful here though. Those who can offer things such as Game Hosting, Game Guild Hosting, Templates for MySpace accounts, and graphics for MySpace accounts will do well. The demographic is mostly young teens so plan accordingly. If you are an E-Commerce Web Host you will find the crowd won’t bite, so better off wasting your time elsewhere. This same principle can be applied to MySpace’s newly formed and not yet finished social networking ads spots. Of all the communities on the Net, MySpace is one of the few who have not added an opt out clause and therefore ads will be more aggressive and might turn users against your company.

If however you feel you need a presence here, create a profile for your company and use the advanced html editing features to brand your profile like your site (same color scheme, make the layout similar etc.) Use the blog section to talk a little about the goings on and let your customers know you have a profile. If everything works well (which will be few and far between) you will have a professional looking profile page, plenty of linked friends who will sing your praises and you may even get a hit or two. But I wouldn’t hold my breath.

LinkedIn
Unlike MySpace with its tons of spammers and teens looking for a quick fix of cute women, LinkedIn is a community site filled with professionals (roughly 7 million). LinkedIn is not a place to find customers. It is however a place to find business who may compliment your own and is a decent place for hiring employees and finding other businesses who can help yours. Again build a company and personal profile and talk to other professionals about getting recommendations. The more recommendations you have, the better you will look. Out of all the popular community sites, this one is one of the quickest and easiest to use. In a weekend, you will be up and running and maybe even have a recommendation or two. You won’t get a lot of traffic from here, but for the time invested you might as well use it.

Flickr
The last place I am going to talk about is Flickr because its practicality might be overlooked when compared to other social sites. With other sites you basically build a profile, get people to link within you and sponsor community discussion. With Flickr you are not going to do any of that. Flickr is a community of photos and artwork.

The best use for Flickr is to post pictures on events, your data center, the internal workings of your company, etc. Say you sponsored an SEO Conference. Build a profile for that conference name and add pictures of what you did while there, the audience, etc. Make sure the pictures showcase people learning, having fun, and doing things together then post a link to your site or if the conference had its own site like say HostingCon, post a link to that. Not only will you be able to host the pictures for your own customers to see (and you can even have some great fun doing this), but those who are looking for Web Hosts will see a softer, more personable side of your business.

Banner ads will always be banner ads no matter if they are targeted by Website or targeted by a social network that zeroes in on what their users need or want. Greater advertising opportunities can be found by actively seeking ties with the community and embedding your brand name within the users’ collective consciousness.

Writer’s Bio: David Dunlap has been both a Web host industry analyst and commentator for the past eight years. Prior to his active writing career, David was a network and communications technician for four years. He currently is the Editor-in-Chief for WebHostMagazine.com

http://www.gawkwire.com/business/advertising_as_we_know_it_needs_to_evolve.html

iPad: The Almost Business Game Changer

2010-04-14T08:35:00-04:00

(WebHost Blog) I have a deep respect for Apple products in that their ease of use and design is exceptional. When I look at the iPad I see an idea, not yet fully formed, but it is that idea that will become a game changing device for business. The most exciting software programs these days are mainly cloud applications, hosted applications, remote applications, etc. in short, vendors are pushing mobile.

The other day I talked about how mobile devices have not forced a change in business culture. This I think is where the iPad comes in. I saw this change happen a long time ago with CD-Roms and a game called Myst. CD-Roms required a vehicle to become accepted by the computer using crowd and they found it in games like Myst and 7th Guest. What’s funny to me is that it not the iPad per se that is catalyst.

Like the bubonic plague that ravaged Europe centuries ago, the problem was not the rats. The rats were merely the carriers of the fleas. What makes the iPad viral (see what I did there… yeah ok it was a bad segue) is not the iPad, but the fact that it carries the Apps Store. It is the Apps Store that will show mobile PC users exactly what they can do with their devices. For instance, PocketCloud. The ability for a person to access their computer from their iPad (or iPhone, if you have masochistic tendencies as far as operating a huge virtual desktop using a tiny little monitor) is incredible.

When you factor in some of the changes iPhone OS 4 will bring to the table, the impact iPad will have on the market will increase. Now I don’t think iPad will create a market as vast and powerful as the iPhone or the iPod have. I do however strongly believe that the iPad will showcase why we have mobile computers and what sort of applications were meant to run on them. And this is why iPad is a game changer. Not because of its feature list (or depending on who you talk to the lack thereof), but on its ability to define a market, which will only get more and more pronounced as the weeks go by.

http://www.gawkwire.com/technology/ipad_the_almost_business_game_changer.html

Why Go Mobile?

2010-04-09T08:44:00-04:00

(WebHost Blog) I realize that there is a growing trend for mobilizing the work force, but no one has told me why this has become an all encompassing necessity for business. We have PDAs, smartphones, cellphones, UMPCs, Tablet PCs, laptops, netbooks, portable media players, PNDs, readers, and I imagine the iPad will open a new category of hybrids, looking at Microsoft’s Courier, this is already coming to pass. We have a huge amount of devices to service how much of the workforce? Where are the killer business apps that are mobile only? Which employees really need to be mobile?

First let’s get rid of the obvious, if your job means you are away from any sort of office type location (be it a corporate building or your own home office), then mobile of course is right for you. However, of those types of jobs that do require travel, how much travel has been reduced by things such as video conferencing, online collaboration software, and the like? Those who do face to face sales, how many require instant access to real time inventory data at the moment of sale as opposed to going into the meeting already knowing the information you need?

Customer support? No, customer support is best served at ground zero. No need for mobile tech there (unless of course you do onsite support). Engineers, technicians, mechanics? Maybe, but most engineers I’ve known will write out ideas on anything they can get their hands on or use the audio message recorder most cells have. Techs and mechanics, like customer support, do a better job with all their tools in front of them and the device that needs to be worked on is physically at hand.

I have been reading statistics on why every business needs to go mobile and the bulk of them center on the premise that the mobile market is huge, selling hundreds of thousands of units each month, which means your competitors are buying. And if they are buying you need to buy too or get left behind! Oh really? I have some six or seven mobile devices I use (what can I say I love technology), but for day-to-day use I use only one of them. In fact, for the most part, even with all the travel I do, the amount of use I get out of the mobile devices is probably about 20 work days per year. This is of course where I absolutely need them and can’t use my desktop computer or my office computer. Now if I didn’t travel a lot, if I didn’t need to go to conferences and the like I wouldn’t need any mobile device to do my job. Sure, they are nice I could go outside and write if I liked (which I do on occasion), but I don’t need to go mobile.

The one area where I can see mobile devices consistently increasing productivity is by replacing the clipboard. In fact, any instance that requires a clipboard (inventory tallies for instance… which I seriously hope people are not still using paper for this but I know that hope is in vain) could do better with a mobile device.

A few weeks ago when I was making changes to this blog, I had to use my cell phone to do it. I did everything I would normally do from my desktop using my cell. It took a while since I can’t just type at super speed on the phone, but I was thankful for the device. That is when it hit me. Businesses like mobile cause it means they can make their salaried employees work during their off time. A while back, when you left the office, that was it, work was done. Even if you took some work home with you, you can work on it at a leisurely pace. Now with all the devices we have, we pretty much take the full offices with us. I was having lunch with a friend of mine and he got a call saying the servers are down, fix it. Although he was not working, he immediately used his cell to check the server and reboot it. Heck who needs to hire more employees when you can have all your current staff on call 24 hours a day 7 days a week? Just pay them an annual salary and you have an offices of slaves at your beck and call.

Will this stop me from buying mobile devices? Course not. But let’s be real here, the uses for mobile devices is far less than the hype. In order for a device to truly change the workplace two things must happen: 1) that device must have something nothing else has, it must have a killer app 2) that device must be able to force change on business culture. Mobile devices do neither of these.

http://www.gawkwire.com/business/why_go_mobile.html