B2B/B2C online strategy and enterprise eBusiness blog

In a previous post, I outlined how we were looking at managed hosting for SuperMotors, to replace the current colocation contract we’ve had for nearly 2 years. After much negotiation with Rackspace, PEER 1, and INetU, none of them were able to come up with a proposal that was attractive enough as ipHouse’s offer. Here’s how things went down:

4th Place: INetU

I really liked their website, the fact that they promoted their customer satisfaction rating (which is really high, at 96%), and they offered FreeBSD (my OS of choice, and where my comfort level is). Unfortunately, their pricing structure is not setup for high-bandwidth environments, as their bid came in much, much higher than the other 3 ISPs who were bidding on our business. Kudos to them for not straying from their core competency, but probably not a viable consideration for us in the future unless they make significant changes to their billing model.

3rd Place: Rackspace

I have real-world experience with Rackspace and their managed hosting, so I knew what to expect in terms of service and support. They did an excellent job in coming down on the costs of their hardware to match PEER 1’s quote, but just were not able to match the bandwidth (they could not go higher than 1000 GB/mo — as this is their standard bandwidth package). They could have gone higher, but at $1/GB, which would have gotten very expensive for us. Had bandwidth not been the primary driver behind our decision, Rackspace might have been our final decision, just based on my past experience with them as a managed hosting provider.

2nd Place: PEER 1

Excellent sales follow-up, paid attention to my blog, and had the best overall price between INetU, Rackspace, and PEER 1. However, in the end, they did not offer FreeBSD for an operating system and required a 12/31/06 commitment date, which would have meant 2 months of overlapped billing with our current ipHouse colocation contract and the new PEER 1 managed contract. Also, switching ISPs would have meant dealing with DNS switches for our customer’s domains, dealing with e-mail account downtime for customers, transferring data over the Internet to the new servers…the list of “cons” went on and on. Granted, this would have been the situation for INetU, Rackspace, or PEER 1…which is why we went with ipHouse:

1st Place: ipHouse

Our current ISP where we’ve colocated for many years now. We’re comfortable with their support, their sales staff, and their network reliability. This, combined with the fact that they will run a managed FreeBSD server for us, matched the PEER 1 bandwidth quote, beat the PEER 1 hardware quote (PEER 1 uses commodity hardware to keep costs down where as ipHouse is getting us new Dell servers). Plus, not having to deal with the IP change, DNS changes, e-mail downtime, etc…everything just made sense for us to stay with the current provider, and for less than we’re paying today. We also bumped up our colocation contract expiration date by 30 days to get started with managed hosting even sooner. Bottom line: no overlap in hosting contracts, faster time-to-production with managed hosting, more bandwidth, better/faster/more reliable servers, less cost.

Moral of the story

• If you’re near the end of your hosting contract, always shop around to see what else is out there. The grass may be greener on the other side.
• Put a competitor’s bid in the hands of your current ISP and see what they can do about meeting or beating the bid.
• Prices are usually negotiable. Never take the first offer and always talk to the rep via phone or e-mail about the quote so they can understand your level of commitment for hosting.
• By renegotiating, you may be able to enter into a new/better contract a month or two sooner than expected — and thus not have to wait for your existing contract to expire, as long as it means your current ISP keeps you as a customer for a longer period of time.
• It’s more expensive for an ISP to obtain a new customer than it is to retain an existing customer for slightly less money.

We recently became new owners of a 50″ Panasonic Plasma TV. With this TV comes HD capabilities. We are die-hard DIRECTV subscribers, so naturally we wanted the best of all worlds: HD + Satellite + DVR.

Unfortunately, being the holiday season, DIRECTV had these wonderful units on back order. So, this meant we would have to settle for standard HD satellite with no DVR capabilities. This is being installed on 12/30. But, good news! Last week (after only about an 8-day waiting period), DIRECTV’s automated service called to inform us that the DVR was available. I promptly called, kindly accepted the $299 one-time charge (spread across 3 billing cycles, of course), and scheduled the DVR for installation on 1/15.

I’m interested to see what the interface is like on this new DVR. It doesn’t appear to be a Tivo unit, so we may be giving up the use of Tivo capabilities, which would really be a bummer. But, with only one HD TV in the house, it’s not like a networked Tivo does us much good, anyway. Plus, downloading HD content via a wireless connection to a PC for offline viewing isn’t exactly, speedy either. Hopefully DIRECTV has ways to schedule programming online with this new DVR. It sure does look nice — can’t wait to get my hands on it.

I’ve been a Google Apps for your Domain user/administrator since they first launched the service with just e-mail hosting. It wasn’t until recently that I noticed they offered more services than just e-mail hosting:

• Calendars
• Chat
• Customized Start Page
• Domain Web Pages

I realized that calendars and chat were basically available, what I didn’t realize was that you could toggle them on/off. I also realized that there wasn’t a waiting list for signing up new domain names any more (though the service is still in “beta”), too. I proceeded to setup google apps for 7 other domain names, making a total of 8 domains that I use Google apps for. After trying to add a 9th domain, I got this message:

The Google Team

Bummer! But, I can’t complain. I’ll take free e-mail hosting for 8 domains. This also means I can clear off all of the e-mail accounts on our mail server which makes one less thing to setup when we switch ISPs. What I also like is the ability to host web pages on a domain name with Google, meaning I can eliminate all of the one-page domains that we host, as well. Can’t wait to see what’s next with the service — hopefully full integration with Picasa, Gmail mobile, and other Google applications/utilities.

It was a busy weekend and I didn’t keep up on my RSS feed reading. Monday’s are typically very busy as well, so here I am, Monday night, catching up on all that’s happened in the online world via my RSS feeds. Now, I realize that bloggers are trying to generate/keep readers and revenue by posting often, but it’s amazing how many blogs cover the same exact stories. Thankfully, Google Reader makes it easy to “skim,” but still.

I hope Google has the following in store for its Google Reader service:

• Search past/present RSS feeds you’ve subscribed to. I can’t believe how many times I start reading, get distracted, close my browser, and wish I could find the feed again. I honestly don’t pay any attention to which blogs I’m reading from — once I’ve subscribed, as far as I’m concerned it’s something I’m interested in and pay little attention to it. With the RSS feed list topping 100 blogs, it’s almost impossible to remember all of them anyway. So, a searchable feed list of my subscribed-to feeds would be great, thanks.
• Mark individual posts as unread. I like to refer to feeds later and don’t want to mark everything as “read.” RSS feeds are great for skimming, but reading with more comprehension or wanting to post comments later on is something I like to do — but I don’t want to keep a list of unread posts in my del.icio.us account. I really don’t have another way to keep track of them…once they’re “read,” they’re gone forever (hence the searchable options; see above bullet point).
• Consolidate posts that are similar in context. Kind of like Gmail organizes threads/conversations by subject, but group blog posts in a similar fashion. This is probably largely beyond the scope of the reader, but hey, it’s Google. They should be able to figure out how to make this a reality. It sure would save me a lot of time. :D  This might also encourage more unique content than simply regurgitating articles/news found on other sites.

Making the switch to Gmail — on a full-time basis
For quite some time, I had been using Google Apps’ hosted e-mail service for negate.net. It’s all nice and everything in that I rarely ever have to worry about e-mail servers going down anymore, but as Google rolls out new features like Gmail mobile (for Blackberry) and other services that are integrated with Gmail and Google Calendar, they seem to forget about the Google Apps hosted domains (like negate.net). In their defense, Google Apps is still in beta, so supporting it in everything they launch may not be a top priority, but I was genuinely bummed when my negate.net e-mail did not work on Gmail’s mobile client.

Gmail supports multiple e-mail accounts with ease
So, today I setup all of my e-mail accounts (those that are hosted by Google and those that are still hosted by me) to be forwarded to my Gmail account which I had never really used before until today. Gmail supports sending from multiple e-mail addresses and as long as you can forward your e-mail to your single gmail.com address, this is really a dream come true for me.

Goodbye Entourage
I am now going to try completely eliminating the use of Entourage (OS X version of Outlook) for e-mail and for calendar purposes. I still use my Exchange server calendar and BlackBerry for most of my scheduling needs, but with Google Notifier, keeping up-to-date with personal calendar events and all of my personal e-mail addresses is quite easy whether I’m on my home computer or my office computer. Not to mention that I have a centralized address book and everything is now fully web-based. Plus, iCal can “subscribe” to my Google Calendar.

RSS + Calendar + Gmail =
Combine all of this with the Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Reader widgets that I can place on my customized Google Homepage, and I really have all of my favorite daily tools one click away via my web browser. Very, very handy. And best of all, it’s all accessible via my BlackBerry. Previously, any e-mails that were downloaded to Entourage on my home computer were essentially in a black hole where I could never get back to them unless I remote-accessed the machine or kept a copy on the server. I’ve never enjoyed either of these two methods — now I have a central source for all of my contacts, mail, and scheduling that lives outside of the office.

As recently posted, monitoring social media is very powerful — particularly when it comes to customer support. Let’s not forget that social a is more than just blogging — it encompasses everything about online communication, including message forums. From simple to complex, message forums are a much larger animal to monitor. Here’s a few recommendatins as well as thoughts on why you should be monitoring social media:

Referring links can sometimes be the crystal ball you’ve been looking for
Setup a daily report so you receive the top 25, 50, 100 (whatever you deem necessary) referring links to your website. We do this for SuperMotors so we can see which sites have generated traffic to SuperMotors.net in the past 24 hours and why. The fact that you get a lot of traffic from referring links is good to know, but you need to evaluate the reason for this traffic. This, by far, is one of the easiest methods at determining whether or not an “internet riot” is brewing regarding your company. I cannot count the number of times this has helped us discover a discussion occuring on another forum regarding a problem with our site.

No matter what, consumers will voice their concerns where it’s convenient for them.
Your customer support phone number and/or e-mail address may be clearly listed on your website, but your customers and consumers in general do not like to wait for answers. This is another reason social media is so powerful when it comes to recommendations and support issues regarding products. What’s more convenient: Calling a customer service center with a question and sitting on hold? E-mailing a customer service center and waiting for feedback? Or searching a website full of consumers who have already encountered the problem or question you have? I’ll search the web first every time before contacting customer service. It’s instantaneous and it’s convenient. Spending 5 minutes researching with Google is often times much more effective than spending 5 minutes navigating through touch-tone phone menus and speaking to a first-tier customer representative.

Find the most popular sites sending traffic to your site and monitor them on a daily basis
My morning routine consists of checking e-mail, reading RSS feeds, and hitting the top 5 discussion forums that drive the most traffic to SuperMotors on a consistent, daily basis. Register accounts on these sites and be available if discussions start up about a problem with your site or business. Use the search feature: search for company name, domain name, mispellings of your company name, abbreviations of your company name — anything to find topics of discussion on your business. This can be extremely effective and will save you from losing customers that otherwise would have gone to a competitive service. Most days, you won’t find anything, and it takes 5-10 minutes of your morning. Other days, you’ll spend quite a bit of time defusing touchy situations regarding poor performance of your service. Suck it up and be honest with your customers, they’ll appreciate it…and they’ll stick with you.

Search blogs, del.icio.us, digg, bloglines, technorati, etc.
Again, doing your due diligence will pay off. You need to know what people are saying about your business. Start with these resources (in no particular order):

• http://blogsearch.google.com/
• http://www.bloglines.com/
• http://www.technorati.com/
• http://www.digg.com/
• http://del.icio.us/

If that’s overwhelming, try monitoring RSS feeds of search results from the above URLs (each of them offers RSS feeds for search queries — except del.icio.us).

Professional social media monitoring & measurement services
I’ll be test-driving BuzzLogic over the next few months as they iron out the kinks in their beta (and will be reporting any interesting findings). You may be interested in a more comprehensive list found here.

Chalk up another well-educated company (PEER 1 Dedicated Hosting) doing their part in monitoring blogs for feedback on their products and service (this makes company #3 to contact me as a result of a blog post in the last few weeks). This morning, I received a call from a sales manager from Peer 1 in response to this post. Again, I must applaud the blogging medium for its power as well as companies who recognize the significance and impact of consumers and customers doing the blogging.

After assuring me that this was not the desired result for my initial experience with them, I also received a call from the rep who I have been working with as we pursue hosting for SuperMotors.net. Since clearing the air, I have received two customer references from PEER 1 (which is really all we’re waiting for to help validate their service — everything else looks great and we anticipate signing a managed hosting contract in the next 2-3 weeks).

I strongly recommend investigating companies that measure social media for your business. I’ll be giving BuzzLogic a shot in the coming months as they perfect their beta. My little blog has found its way to 3 vendors I do business with. Just imagine how many of your consumers and customers could be saying something about your company on their blogs. My whole perception of Omniture, Clickshift, and Peer 1 has drastically improved as a result — and it very easily could have lead me to another vendor without them reaching out to me.

After a recent post about Clickshift being acquired by WebTrends and voicing my concerns, and a previous experience with Omniture monitoring blog posts, I did get a call (voicemail) and e-mail follow-up from Clickshift. Let me go on a slight tangent by saying how much I love how powerful blogs can be and how easily accessible the information is for research and brand protection. I think there’s a definite future in this way of servicing new and existing customers and really allows companies to obtain candid feedback from real-world users, and not just people who are so fed up that they call customer service to complain — and quite frankly, I don’t have the time to do this as it’s typically easy enough to go to a competitor. Here I am now, championing their efforts and feeling important to them.

I digress. Back to the WebTrends aquisition of Clickshift. Not to worry says Clickshift: same service, just a new logo. So I’m back to looking at their very attractive SEM model again. With 2007 budgets nearing finalization, whichever route I choose can’t begin until January, so I have some time to look over it in a little more detail and learn how exactly they will integrate with our site — and how it can co-exist with Omniture. I realize that technically speaking, the code easily co-exists on each page. It’s the data analysis and path-to-conversion process that is going to be somewhat of an overlap.

On one side, I will have Omniture reporting data on non-SEM conversions and then through Clickshift, I will have SEM-based conversions. Not having this data centrally managed requires me to consolidate both sets of data either in a spreadsheet or by some other means. This was the beauty with the Omniture model is that all SEM data and web analytics data could be rolled into a single report. While they haven’t exactly made that process painless (and I’m considering going to Omniture University to learn how to get the most out of their application), I take comfort in knowing that it’s all there if and when I need it. Time will tell. If Clickshift truely works, then the time savings alone in bid management rules and the day-to-day babysitting of SEM will far outweigh the temporary inconvenience of rolling data from 2 sources into 1 report/spreadsheet.

I deal with vendors on a daily basis, most of which are a pleasant experience. Then there are the others that are either, too pushy and only interested in the sale, and then there are others who cannot close the sale because of a simple question.

Take Peer 1, a managed hosting company who we are strongly considering to have handle SuperMotors.net hosting. Everything checks out on their website - professionally designed, up-to-date information, current press releases. Not much in terms of comments on their managed hosting service online, but that may be because this is still a relatively new market for managed hosting with not a lot of competitors and customers. The price looks good, the company looks good, but when I ask for 2-3 existing customer references (of equal or higher contract terms as we’re considering) from the sales rep I’ve been working with, I get nothing. Last communcation from the rep was on November 13th. It’s now December 5th. I’ve sent follow-up e-mails re-requesting 2-3 customer references on November 14th, November 26th, and December 1st.

I guess e-mails are not good enough and I’ll need to call. It shouldn’t be this hard for us to spend money. Not only is this annoying, but it speaks volumes about their commitment to customer service. Do they even have 2-3 customers that are going to give them top marks? Strike 1 for Peer 1!

Good news for ClickShift.com, not good news for me (read how I was considering Clickshift). Actually, maybe it’s good news. My biggest hangups with turning over SEM optimization from Omniture to ClickShift were:

• Losing control of the Google AdWords account that handled the keyword management for us
• Having to pay up-front for the cost of SEM rather than after the work was performed
• Using yet another vendor and introducing some overlap between Omniture and Clickshift

Now that WebTrends has purchased Clickshift, this may very well eliminate the possibility of using them as a vendor because they will be integrated with WebTrends (a direct competitor to Omniture) and we previously used WebTrends and switched to Omniture (plus, I really, really dislike the WebTrends UI). This purchase also helps explain why I heard nothing from Clickshift after saying I would be able to do business with them after the new year (when we get our new SEM budget). They were so focused on trying to get me to sign a contract that it almost seemed a little pushy and…well, strange. Hopefully being bought by WebTrends eliminates this and it can safely integrate with WebTrends services. Kudos to WebTrends for a very strategic aquisition. This gives them a significant competitive advantage over the other web analytics companies.

This may be a good thing for us in that I can focus on allocating funds towards Omniture’s professional search consulting to assist in creating optimized business rules. It still doesn’t feature the Clickshift automation and featureset, but maybe through requests and complaining from enough of their customers, they will add it in a future release of SearchCenter. I really hope they do (our corporate discount with Omniture is fantastic). The amount of manual labor that goes into managing each individual business rule in Omniture is significant. Clickshift was really onto something.

On a side note, I did receive the Google digital photo frame gift today.