Our CEO, Doug Erwin keynoted Day 2 at ISPCON! Are you surprised? His topic was Beyond Hosting: Unlocking Profits with On Demand IT Infrastructure for the SMB, and he shared a The Planet’s perspective on the evolving IT marketplace, including several suggestions to effectively keep up with it.

I’ll dive deeper into what he shared at the conference in a future blog post, but I wanted to submit a quick update on the happenings from Day 2 at ISPCON.

In addition to Doug’s keynote, I joined three very interesting breakout sessions and continued my trek through the conference Exhibit Hall. The breakout sessions I graced with my presence? “30 Rapid-fire Website Wins, Guaranteed,” “Five Ways to Boost Profits without Increasing Costs: Customer Services” and “Guerrilla Marketing for Service Providers.” Needless to say, I was like a kid in a candy store.

My Key Takeaways

From the “Website Wins” session: Several of the “wins” really jumped out at me as key features in efficient site design. With an increased emphasis on simplicity and clarity to the paradigm shift of “site construction” to “site gardening,” the site development process is clearly in a period of transition to best facilitate the customer experience, search engine friendliness and cross-browser compatibility.

From the “Customer Services” session: Customer service is at the heart of a host’s business. Web hosts should have a customer-centric mentality rather than a product-centric mentality to truly be successful in the industry. That underlying mentality will bleed into every aspect of your business, and will be conveyed both implicitly and explicitly through all of a company’s communication.

From the “Guerrilla Marketing” session: There are countless ways to differentiate and market your company outside of the traditional marketing techniques, and the question featured in the conclusion of the presentation embodied the guerrilla marketing mentality: “Is your message one in a million or is your marketing message just another one of the millions?” I enjoyed the session because it investigated many effective “outside the box” opportunities to generate interest and improve the customer’s buying experience (or at least the experience they have while they are receiving marketing information).

We’ve got one more day worth of sessions here in San Jose, so look for more stellar insight soon!

-Kevin

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

Despite having traveled a fair bit and having been born in India, I’ve never been to China. I’ve always really wanted to go. Heck, my wife and I even considered getting married at the Forbidden Gardens here in Texas. As cool as that place is, I have to believe that the real deal is much more impressive.

While no one ever really needs one, it seems to me that the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing might just give me the perfect excuse to go. If going to Beijing by itself wouldn’t be cool enough, its even more interesting when you hear about the preparation the city is going through, whether that be far fetched attempts at weather modification to stamping out bad translations on street signs all the way to mass education on etiquette in preparation for a global flock of visitors.

As ridiculous as this might sound, the work of the Olympics organizing committee reminds me a lot about my work here at The Planet. In preparation for the Olympics, this group has analyzed and anticipated the needs of their visitors/customers, built out solutions to meet those needs and ultimately are in the process of building out a scalable infrastructure that can accommodate a glut of demand.

Now, you’ve heard Will and Jeff talk about meeting our customer needs through building scalable networks or having N+1 redundancy within our data centers. While I’m always interested in what those guys are up to, my job is really about identifying needs and helping build solutions, which may sound pretty unbelievable when I say that I work in Marketing. In any case, many of you may remember we did a customer satisfaction survey and followed up to get a better view of what products and services our customers. Remember the banners in the customer portal?

First of all, I want to thank the thousands of you that took time to respond. There were a lot of quick hits that we learned and responded to. For instance 49% of you said that you were concerned about bandwidth prices and overages and we launched a promotion on unmetered bandwidth, or that 70% of you rated increased storage capacity as Important or Very Important, which led us to release our Managed Dedicated SAN offering . We heard you loud and clear on a number of others products and services, but some of them will take a bit longer before we can rollout, so stay tuned.

In the meantime, I wish we could get a little weather modification here before the summer heat really sets in.

- Urvish

a night doesn’t go by that I don’t find myself thinking about the planet’s current and future customers … about their business needs … their suggestions and comments … and how they rely on the planet to supply their IT solutions … it’s one of the things that keeps me up at night … i’ve spent a lot of time in the past few months … talking to lots of folks and asking questions … anytime I could corner some of our employees, customers or industry folks … picking up bits and pieces on what we can do better …

i’m very lucky to have a great group of folks at the planet and incredible customers … all willing to talk to us … in fact, we feature a number of our customer success stories on our web site … dickson supply, bigstockphoto.com and auto lead exchange to name just a few … these companies come to the planet for help in managing their hosting operations … they don’t want to manage server farms or internet providers … and don’t want to run their own data centers and man them 24×7x365 or worry about negotiating the best hardware deal … they’ve asked the planet to take on that responsibility …

no matter what business you’re in … to serve your customers you need to talk to them and really understand their business needs … there’s an old, old, old sales saying, “to sell john brown what john brown buys, you must learn to see through john brown’s eyes,” … don’t remember the author but I picked it up during ibm sales training … a couple of weeks ago we had a company meeting and talked about some of our customers … I talked with employees about customer success stories … about how companies rely on us to run their business … which is why we’ve got to be at the top of our game … i talked about ownership and follow through … about customer satisfaction and how we all work to support their needs …

i wanted all my employees to hear from a customer first-hand so they can continue to learn what “johnny” needs … so i invited a customer to come and speak to the company and tell them first-hand about why they picked us and what they expect from the planet in regards to support and service … this customer also happened to be one of our newer accounts that’s moving their entire server inventory to the planet from two other providers … the speaker did a super job … at the end of the meeting I heard several folks talking about the impact he made and how it really crystallized our responsibility to customers … we’re going to do more talking and listening to our customers … I know we can never talk to all 22,000 of you, but we can try … over the next quarter we’ll be launching several programs toward this end …

we have a great group of employees at the planet … and we’re continuing to invest in them with training and tools … and along the way we’ll bring talent in to fill certain needs … speaking of which … the latest addition to the senior management team is steve reichert … steve joins us as vice president of information technology and operations … he’ll be running the IT organization, software development and operations of our data centers in both cities …

steve comes to the planet with more than 27 years of experience in running IT organizations and data centers … most recently from infocrossing in omaha … in college he did his fortran and cobol programming on a 029 key punch that he lugged around in his backpack … just kidding … he’s trading in the corn fields and moving to dallas, where he lived for more than 16 years earlier in his career … you can read more about him on our web site … we’re thrilled to have him join the team … we’re working really hard to supply you with great products, excellent service and great results … we know we have more to do … in fact we’ll never totally be satisfied because excellence in never truly achieved … the yard sticks keeps moving …

thanks for your notes … all the input helps me learn … and even sleep better at night … be careful … it’s a jungle out there.

- Doug