The Planet Blog

Do you know the way to San Jose? Well, if you do, you should hustle this direction for ISPCON. This week, we’ve got a few people here for the conference where “the service provider industry goes to GET REAL about the future of their businesses,” and I wanted to post a quick blog with a couple of the highlights from Day 1.

The conference is built around eight specific areas of interest to service providers: Wireless, Hosting, Technology, VOIP, Applications, Customers, Facilities and General Business. Attendees can select the most relevant topics to their business and join in the “Conference Breakout” sessions they find the most interesting. This conference structure allows for a great deal of customization, but the unfortunate trade-off lies in the fact that one might want to attend several of the concurrent sessions. To poetically paraphrase Robert Frost:

Several “Conference Breakout” sessions diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not attend all
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked at one session as close as I could
To where I could its topic call …

I won’t make you endure the rest of that silliness. I can tell you which topics I checked out this morning sans rhyme: “Using Social Networking and Web 2.0 to Market Your Business,” “Choosing to be Great Instead of Big,” “Strategies for Growing Your Hosted Business,” and the Day 1 Keynote session, “Neutrality’s Linchpin, is Bandwidth a Commodity?”

My Key Takeaways

From the “Web 2.0 to Market Your Business” session: the hosting marketplace is evolving as the digital world is evolving, so marketing departments have got to dynamically adjust to be most effective: blogging, social networking, social bookmarking, creating videos, etc. To illustrate the shift from Web 1.0 to 2.0, check out the YouTube video used in the presentation.

From the “Choosing to be Great” session: It’s very difficult to be “Great” and “Big.” A “Great” company is defined as “great in customers’ eyes, great in quality, great in the community, and a great place to work,” and a “Big” company often struggles to meet all of those requirements. A company must devote all of its focus to its customer experience, social impact and employee environment or it will fall short of “Great”ness.

From the “Strategies for Growing” session: A host has to provide value, a great customer experience, and sticky products. Value and customer experience are pretty self-explanatory, but the sticky product term may need a little clarification: A sticky product is one that inherently generates loyalty or “gets customers to stick.” A great indicator for your product’s stickiness? Churn.

The keynote session: Cogent’s Founder and CEO Dave Schaeffer explained his perspective on Net Neutrality. In a nutshell, he would like to see the Internet entirely “open, fair and accessible to everyone.” Because this is such a hot-button issue, there was an active Q&A session to wrap up the keynote. The most interesting question I heard was “Shouldn’t there be some kind of file priority in the event of a bandwidth shortage … or to put it more succinctly, is every packet of information equal?” Dave didn’t skip a beat when he responded, “I do believe that some traffic deserves a higher priority, but file priority should be a moot point. Instead of worrying about a theoretical limit bogging down bandwidth, we should overbuild our widespread network infrastructure to provide more than enough capacity for all traffic to be delivered at high priority.”

This afternoon, I’ll head into the Expo hall and find some good swag to bring home and show off. Look forward to another blog post soon about Day 2 which will include Doug’s headlining keynote!

-Kevin

Long Distance Social Networking circa 1993:
Get paper.
Get pen.
Sit and hand write the first draft.
Massage hand for a moment to get the cramps out.
Find the nice stationary and the good pen — the one that doesn’t leak.
Write more.
Crumple up that first page because you totally left out a word.
Write more.
FINISH!
Place in envelope.
Write out the envelope.
Realize you left out the last page.
Argh …
Open (and ruin) envelope.
Write it out once more.
Place the letter (all pages!) in the new envelope.
Seal. (Ick. The glue is gross.)
Find a stamp.Um. Stamp. Where are they? Think.
Tear up your house looking for one.
“MOM! I need a STAMP.”
Bug mom to get stamps on her way home from work for two days.
Get the stamp and place the letter in the mail.
Wait weeks to see if your friend received it while everything in it is completely outdated.
Start over again.

Long Distance Social Networking today:
Log onto Myspace.
New Comments! New Messages!
JOY!
Read messages and comments.
Respond.
The end.

The above happens within a two-minute timeframe. Who would have known how vastly different the world would change in a mere 14 years. Really, five years if you simply go by the introduction of the Internet to the masses. It has changed the way we communicate in every capacity. Everything is faster, sleeker, wittier and smaller. Every day teeny tiny new little gadgets are invented to enable us to stay plugged into everything: our friends (and frenemies), TV, music, movies, sports, news, gossip … it’s never ending.

I find it all incredibly fascinating.

Technology is moving so fast that it’s hard for even the techiest of tech people to keep up. Web 2.0 applications and practices are in full swing with blogs and social networking sites becoming actual outlets for advertising and marketing opportunities. Not just a place to write about what you had for breakfast and saying “What’s up” to your homies. The entire landscape of the Internet has changed and in the grand scheme of things, it’s still in its infancy. As a result, traditional marketing and advertising practices are taking a backseat to more innovative approaches.

I’ve often been questioned by people who haven’t embraced the Internet (and more specifically social networking sites) as fervently as I have. They don’t get it. I might as well be telling them that I talk to monkeys. But slowly, even the most skeptical people are coming around.

My first foray into the realm of Internet geekdom was message boards. I found a couple that focused on topics I liked and I dove right in. Now, I’m a social person. I talk non-stop. (Go figure I work in communications.) I love to debate, but even more so, I love being in the know.

So the world of message boards was like a little piece of pixel heaven. I can talk, laugh, argue and always be in the know because the posts stay there. I can go to bed fully engrossed in a topic, then wake up the next morning and catch up on what I missed while drinking my coffee and lounging in my jammies. You can’t do that in real-time. If you aren’t there, you simply miss out.

For years, I was happy in my little communities. I knew everyone. Everyone knew me. It was like Cheers but with a keyboard and no beer. I made friends and attended “meet-ups.” I talked regularly to folks both on the boards and on IM from all over the country. Then one day, my friend Gabe sent me an invite to MySpace. I was totally confused. I had heard of Friendster and never understood it, either. I mean, why would I need MySpace? I have my beloved message boards!

I accepted the invite and let the page sit for months. Suddenly, all the people I interacted with regularly on message boards were getting pages. They started leaving comments and writing blogs. Slowly those same people started become more open and really letting parts of themselves show through. The blogs became personal. Pages were designed to reflect their tastes in art, music, film and TV. It really became and extension of themselves.

I know people often question the usefulness of social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. They want to know why you would want or have a need for those sites, when message boards are available and so prevalent.

There are two very distinct differences between the two:
1) Message boards are about the community more than the individual, and social sites are the opposite.
2) Networking sites allow users to control who they interact with.

With social sites, the user is the superstar, so to speak. The content is about them. It’s where they can show off their creativity and inner celebrity. And most importantly, they control who views it and who’s allowed to participate. All of this in conjunction with the explosion of YouTube gives the “average Joe” the ability to create their own community of fans and get a taste of celebrity life via the Internet. Think of it as the “Me” generation of the 80’s with a focus on celebrity status rather than financial (and less hairspray).

The Web has changed the way we think and interact, both in our personal lives and in business. Marketing and advertising companies have had to completely rethink strategies … but that’s something I’ll visit in part 2. Stay tuned!

I KNOW. That’s so old school. I’m bringing it back, though.

- Ali

According to Wikipedia.org, O’Reilly Media coined the phrase Web 2.0 sometime in 2004. The term has since become ubiquitous, but it’s difficult to pin down when Web 2.0 — the focus of the Internet community on user-generated content — actually began.

When social-networking sites like MySpace began making news and gaining popularity of course I had to take a look. What I found was largely underwhelming. Not to disparage the creators of MySpace — that community is a force of nature, and something to be respected and admired by all Internet entrepreneurs — it just didn’t seem like a completely new concept.

After all, forums are comprised of users who generate their own content, upload photos to their profiles and create online communities, usually based on a particular interest or hobby. These are communities nonetheless. Who knew sites like Web Hosting Talk and our own humble customer forums would be the unacknowledged godfathers to an entire movement called Web 2.0?

Hopefully the popularity of forums won’t diminish like other user-generated content formulas. I’ve always felt the advantage forums have over other types of communities is their ability to foster dialogue in an arena overcrowded with monologues. And yes I am aware of the irony of using a blog to make that statement.

It’s my belief that both mediums of communication are essential to building relationships with our customers. In fact, I’d like to think that we add value that even goes beyond exchanging credit card numbers for dedicated servers. Blogs provide an opportunity to communicate a concept, idea or opinion to its fullest, while communication in our forums is mostly reactive versus informative.

So until next time … I’ll see you on the forums!

- Brooke