Results tagged “Twitter”

Sales are boring.

They're predictable.

Every year we run a sale of some kind in January.

Sure, it's nice to get a sales boost in the New Year and we know people love getting stuff at lower prices, but it's become a little predictable and staid at this stage.

So what are we going to do this year?

Well this time round we're going to "jazz it up" a bit.

Instead of just giving a lower price on a product or service for the next 30 days, we're going to "mix it up" a bit.

What does that mean?

Well in essence it means we're going to offer discounts on different things at different times.

So, for example, we could decide to give away our entry level hosting plan for a 24 hour period at a knockdown price, or we might offer IE domain names for a fraction of our normal retail price.

How will this work?

It's kind of an experiment, so how exactly it will pan out is a bit "up in the air".

We'll be pushing out offer codes through a variety of media, so if you want to get your hands on a discount then you'll need to keep an eye on us on Twitter and Facebook. We might shove a few discounts on this site or my personal blog, or maybe we'll give a few codes to bloggers.

Who knows?

Of course this might prove to be a total disaster, but I'm always willing to try something new just to see what happens.

What do you think?

Are we crazy?

Would you prefer a "traditional" sale?

Let us know what you think - all feedback is welcome!

We'll be kicking it all off either tomorrow or Monday, but in the meantime if you're looking for a discount feel free to use the coupon code: movehost



The small print:

Any discounts and offers will be valid for the initial subscription period. They will rebill at the full price rate on their anniversary

We finally got the new shared hosting offering ready for public consumption in in August - not quite a year overdue, but not far off it!

One of the things we have learnt over the past few years is that no matter how well prepared you might be things can and will go wrong. The delays with launching the new products and services caused us a lot of heartache and pain, as we'd been hoping to launch them a lot sooner. I don't like going back on my word, but if it's not ready, it's not ready. What can you do?

We also launched an offsite blog for our technical announcements ie. when stuff breaks or when we're planning on breaking it (I mean upgrading it *cough*). The offsite blog is completely independent of our network and doesn't even use our nameservers, so as long as our staff can get net access they can post updates to it.

To help people keep track of what we're up to we also got a presence on both Facebook and Twitter. We'll be pushing out more of our promotions and special offers via those channels in the coming months - so watch that space!

What else have we been up to?

On the staff side of things we expanded even more, with some new faces joining the team, while some others moved on to other things.

Our planned office expansion / remodelling project is on the backburner again, but at least we're in the fortunate position of having the extra space in the building when we need it.

It's been an interesting year in the hosting and internet business globally, with a lot of acquisitions and mergers. New technologies are proving popular, while some of the companies that have been around for years now face uncertain futures (think Yahoo!).

With that in mind I travelled to both DomainFest in LA and the ICANN meeting in Paris. The DomainFest event was great fun, but also a wonderful opportunity to see what people are up to in other countries. The same is true of ICANN meetings - I always come away with new contacts and ideas (we won't talk about how sane the ideas are!).

2009 is going to be an interesting year for us, as we push out some new stuff for our clients to enjoy.

Let's hope it's as good (overall) as 2008 has been!

One of the wonderful things about our line of business is that so many of our clients are happy to share their experiences with us in public. A lot of them send us emails, blog about us, twitter or post on forums and mailing lists.

Of course not all of their comments and feedback are going to be positive, but if we listen to what they are saying we may be in a position to capitalise on the feedback.

While we can't work miracles many of the issues people encounter while interacting with us can be easily rectified. It can be a simple matter of changing the wording in an email slightly or moving a link.

Unfortunately there will always be things that we cannot change or where we have to take the feedback, accept that is valid, but still aren't in a position to do anything about it in the short term.

In some cases it's simply because the technology or process is beyond our control (think EPP keys for domains). Other times it's because we made a decision to do things in a particular way and the underlying reasons for this may not be accepted by all our clients as readily as we might like (not allowing ssh access to our new hosting platform for example).

It's really encouraging to read people talking about their positive experiences and what they've learnt along the way.

Hugh, for example, did an interesting post yesterday on how upgrading his VPS led to an improve not only in his site's responsiveness, but also in its Google ranking. It's the kind of story that great case studies are made of.

We didn't ask Hugh to write about his experiences and he's not always going to say 100% positive things about us. His feedback is genuine.

Dealing with really negative feedback is awkward at the best of times.

Over the past few years we, as a company, have changed quite a bit.

When I came back to Ireland from Milan in 2003 there were 1.5 people working for the company. Five years later we have 16 fulltime staff in our offices and several contractors working for us on a fairly regular basis.

We've gone from having so few servers that I could actually count them, to a number that I don't even want to look at.

With the changes have come many improvements. We're offering a lot more services and at a lower price than previously, but in order to do that we have had to remove some of the "personal touch" and to standardise a lot of things. When you have to deal with some of the backlash that comes with these changes it can be quite traumatising. Business is business, but it's hard not be personally invested in your own company. I can feel great pride in the kind words, but I will, naturally, take the negative as closely to heart.

So how can you deal with these changes?

I honestly don't know the answer!

What I have found helpful, however, is some of the lessons in "Crossing the Chasm". Ross Cooney suggested I grab a copy a few years ago and it has helped make sense of some of the chaos!

It still won't make dealing with the extremely irate clients any easier of course, but I'm not 100% sure if anything truly can. What it has taught me, however, is that not all customers are going to have the same expectations and that we need to learn how to deal with the different ones as best we can.

While it would be lovely to be able to please everyone it simply isn't possible.
Take the negative feedback onboard.
Don't ignore it.
Maybe you can change something for the better.
Maybe you can take a customer's bad experience and put it to good use.
Maybe you can't.
Try to keep an open mind.

Just don't stick your head in the sand.

That someone would come up with an award for the best generators of content under 140 characters ie. twitter, strikes me as genuinely interesting.

While I still do have reservations about Twitter (or maybe it's just the fanboys...) I now use it actively, so I'd be a hypocrite to be overly critical..

You can read more about how it all works here

Every few months somebody somewhere will publish yet another article or report claiming that blogging is dead and that something else has come along to replace it.

Today's Sunday Business Post IT supplement is no different.

You can read the article via the link I've provided above, but in essence they're trying to make out that blogs are being replaced.

Personally I don't agree at all.

I've been blogging for about 5 years at this stage. I started off doing it on a purely personal level, but over time my posts began to cover topics that were related to the business and the industry I work in.

Eventually I decided that there was no point not having a company blog, so I set this one up.

Facebook, Bebo, Twitter, Jaiku and any of the other "networking" sites that may appear in the future, are all wonderful tools in their own way.

Each site serves its users in its own particular manner and is probably geared towards a specific demographic. Just because a site exists does not mean that its demographic is really suited to your business. (Obviously this depends on what you are selling)

However, I honestly do not think that you can categorically claim that Bebo or Facebook can replace a blog.

We are active on both Facebook and Twitter, but we have also hooked our two existing company blogs into both systems, so instead of one replacing another we are using the RSS from the blogs to enrich the content we are publishing elsewhere.

You might also notice that every single page of our main website has the RSS feeds from both blogs and the forum. We also provide links to the two blogs via the customer control panel.

What that hopefully means is that people will be able to access the information we need them to access easily.

Unlike "traditional" marketing techniques RSS powered media, such as blogs, use "pull" instead of "push".

What does that mean in reality?

Well instead of us sending you a marketing message (or industry information) we make it available in a manner that allows you to choose if you want to get it or not.

That doesn't mean that we have abandoned more "traditional" marketing techniques - we still send out email newsletters to clients for example, and we spend quite a bit on print media advertising in Ireland, the UK and the US.

Some people talk about blogs and other media as being a way of engaging in a conversation and I guess that description is probably quite appropriate. We put ourselves "out there" whenever and wherever we can and are more than happy to take on board constructive feedback. Of course not all of our interactions with the public are successful and sometimes I'll say something very harsh that I might not have said if I'd taken a few minutes to think before speaking!

If we can take action based on the feedback then hopefully we'll be able to offer a better service to our clients and, in turn, make more money.

Yes - I am more than happy to admit it. We are a business. A business exists to make money. Period.

We have certain values that we consider to be important, but ultimately the main reason we decided to embrace the various outlets was to improve our sales and spend our marketing budget more intelligently.

It's a simple philosophy.

If we can give people a good level of service and they are happy then we can make more money.

When I was first employed by EuroDisney 16 years ago they sent us all on a two day training course to give us an overview of the company, its history, values and more. One of the key lessons I learnt then and that I will always value is that of the happy customer vs. the unhappy one. An unhappy customer can cost a business a fortune. Their direct spend may not impact on your bottom line, but as most people give greater weight to personal recommendations a vocal critic can cost you a lot more than what they would have spent themselves. Conversely while happy clients may recommend you business more of them are likely to simply not say anything at all ie. you're more likely to hear about your critics than your fans.

Does it work?

It's hard to judge exactly how well it works using standard metrics. If we run an ad campaign on Google Adwords we can easily see how well that converts, but blogs and other "social media" (I really hate that term!) aren't as easy to track. In many respects they are not that different from print media advertising - you only notice the real impact after a longer period of time.

Unfortunately the "web 2.0" phenomenom (if that is the correct word) seems to have spawned a lot of "consultants" and self-proclaimed "experts" who seem to spend more time playing buzzword bingo with their clients money than actually producing any real results.

Anytime I see people talking about "thought leadership" or "intelligence" or "increasing an organisations IQ" when talking about blogs I have to fight an overwhelming urge to puke.

More often than not the "consultants" who use those terms have little or no clue about business. Sorry, but that's the distinct impression I get.

You can advocate social media until the cows come home, but you need to stop using stupid buzzwords to make yourselves appear more intelligent.

Business people don't understand marketing buzzwords - they understand tangible examples.

If you can show them how embracing blogging and other media can help them make more money or reduce their customer service issues, then maybe you might make progress.

I would, of course, say something very similar to Open Source software advocates. Telling people that Microsoft is evil isn't constructive. Showing an SME how they can achieve the same results for less investment by using Open Office is a lot more useful.

In summary blogs aren't going anywhere anytime soon and while other platforms and media may be useful you'd be better off looking at incorporating them rather than dumping one medium in favour of another.

Maybe I don't have a clue what I'm talking about, but I know what works for me!