MySpace - A Social Or An Advertising Network
June 29, 2007
I have cut the below image from a post stuck in popular web hosting forums. It urges forum members “Advertise your site on the Internet’s hottest social networking and most popular site: MySpace”.
The poster offers to forum members to place their ads on his MySpace bulletin and to reach 20,000 legit unique U.S. users of the social network. The price is $5.00. The guy also says that he had “great success with AdSense conversions through MySpace bulletin advertising”.
“Social” Turns To “Commercial”
The first thing that came to my mind was “Excellent. I would benefit from this one”. And then I decide that no one that created account in the social network went there to read ads and to spammed.
The reality however is that many people join to any kind of social networking only to send commercial messges to others. This is one of the main reasons that I use to stay away from thoe web sites. Once your e-mail is caught you start receiving spam. Despite the strickt Terms of service of the most networking web sites, their members use internal messaging systems to spam each other.
The social networks are poised to be a a ground for commercial activities. According to Wikipedia MySpace employs 300 people and it had about 106 million accounts before September 8, 2006. The famous Wiki also say that the 230,000 new member use to join the network every single day.
I thought that it wasn’t polite at all to use a social network to deliver commercial messages. But that was when I was writing the first part of this post. Now I feel I’m in not in a good position to present moral arguments which can support my thesis. Because the market rules! The social networks like MySpace are important communication channells on the same “good old market”. So just go there and create your own MySpace bulletin that covers website business topics. And I’ll probably be ready to pay more than $5 to distribute my ads.
A Good Web Hosting Support Means…
June 28, 2007
You can find tons of articles about web hosting support and how to organize it. I don’t think I can write the right one. And if you really want to find a good knowledge about customer support you can visit Doug Hanna’s blog ServiceUntitled.com. But when we talk about web hosting I can really say something about customer care.
I’ve been in web hosting for five years, and believe me, it is much easier for me to create a good model of customers support than to put one into practise. This is because both the implementation of any concept and management of customer care center mean “hard work”, day by day. But even that putting things into daily life is much more important than thinking, there still should be someone to focus on creative management and building concepts 
To find how to be in favour of its customers - would be a daily task of any web hosting provider.
So let’s talk about customer support in web hosting. A good example of well-oganized and useful customer management and billing system is ModernBill. If you have enough time to scrutinize it you don’t need to go further on this article. For those who prefer to stay with DawHB.com for a few more minutes I’ll try to explain what I think is a “good model” of customer management in web hosting.
Business Processes from A to Z
The staff of any web hosting company that supports a large number of customers usually has t have a good knowledge over the whole range of products and services the company offers to them. Web hosts must have a detailed description of the services their company provides into account. And to monitor them every day. Once a company has that information it can focus on usability.
Lets say you run a web hosting company that offers 20 different software applications to its customers…. and most of them use only 7 of them. You definitely don’t need to spend time and money to maintain other thirteen. It is much better to find other software applications which your customers would like to use on their web sites. A knowledge on how do your customers use your services and products is very important. I know you know that, but do work on it.
Building A Good Communication
Why do people go to news websites such as New York Times, News.com, TheWHIR in web hosting industry, or to any other regularly updated leading web media. Because they want to read a good content, to know what’s going on around, to entertain and of course to learn.
Let’s say if you have 5000 web hosting customers in you database. The more you know about their websites, about what do they need to handle their day-to-day businesses, the more options you will have to offer them various useful tools. It is a really good idea for example to make customers to come as often as they can to your pages. What to do to turn your pages into a business hub website that anyone wants to visit is a subject of a whole new article. I don’t know if I’m going to write it but you know more about your business than anyone else. So the only thing to do is to draw it, and to see how does it look like.
Having a blog, forums, chat, or to conducting surveys, as well as to improving the business environment of your customers is very important. They will appreciate your busines a lot if they can get a good advice from someone, to discuss anything or just to chat to anyone when they come to your pages.
Analytics And Creative
Spend time to extract information from analytical data you have collected. This is the best you can do, once you’ve already got an information about your customers’ business affairs. And once you have already build a good inhouse data management and analytics system. A good customer support team has to do regular research over company’s customer base. That means to know more about the the country, state, business area of your customers. And also to get into account any other things that would give you fresh ideas about how to manage a website hosting provider and how to develop it.
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