The Planet Blog

I’m Kevin, and I’m the “new guy” at The Planet with the peculiar “Web Hosting Evangelist” job title. This customer evangelist role is a new one at our company, so it’s likely to change a bit as I jump into the job. I can give you a quick run-down of what I’ll be doing, and you can decide if you want to create a “Kevin Hazard Is Amazing Fan Club” or just not read my blog posts. As Chevy Chase explains in Caddyshack, “In one physical model of the universe, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line … in the opposite direction,” so the best way to approach “what” I will be doing is to back into it from the other direction: Why am I doing it?

The “Why”

As you probably know if you have read any press releases, articles, or interviews about/by anyone The Planet,

“The Planet is the leading provider of On Demand IT Infrastructure solutions, hosting more than 22,000 small- and medium-size businesses and 2.8 million Web sites worldwide. By offering the best choice of servers, software tools and world-class support, backed by state-of-the-art facilities and unmatched network connectivity, The Planet helps turn information technology into a powerful competitive advantage that enables customers to successfully grow their businesses.”

While that description accurately and succinctly summarizes a great deal of information about our company, it doesn’t tell much about “who” the company is, and it is certainly not blog fodder. I was hired by The Planet to use a bit of my uncanny wit and debonair charm to provide a little more “corporate transparency” for you. We are not reinventing the wheel by having a blog, but it is one of the “best practices” for beginning the move toward transparency on the large scale.

My goal is to provide a bit more insight into The Planet’s day-to-day business. I may snap some pictures of day-to-day life around the office or interview (read: question mercilessly) some unknowing Planet employee. Do a quick search for “company evangelist” or “corporate evangelist,” and more often than not, you’ll see the word “listen” at least a dozen times. In a word, I’ll be a “listener,” proactively maintaining great communication in the provider-customer relationship.

The “What”

1. Improve the User Experience.
2. Refer to Responsibility #1
3. Refer to Responsibility #1

Those extensive responsibilities are fairly broad and quite general, but entirely accurate. In addition to making some magic happen here through our blog, I will work with our Web development team to improve the user experience on our corporate site and in our order process, from your first click to your server’s provisioning … and even through the “eternal life” of your account (sorry, a little “evangelist” humor). We’ve already got a solid plan of attack to begin some of these experience improvements, and we will tap the advice of you, our customer (or prospective customer, wink-wink) to ensure we continue on the right track to provide the best hosting experience in the industry.

I have already seen a few blog content suggestions in the comment sections of other posts, but if you have any other content requests, drop them in a comment on this post or send me an email at khazard (at) theplanet (dot) com.

- Kevin

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 18th, 2007 at 5:00 am and is filed under Evangelist's Corner. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.