November 8, 2006

ISPCON, the Internet service provider conference began yesterday in Santa Clara, California. Overall, ISPs, Web hosting companies and many combinations thereof met to examine some of the issues of most significance to their own business.

Tuesday's program included a session on the "Five Best Kept Secrets of Marketing Your Hosting Company: Insider's Perspective," moderated by VerticalScope managing editor Cliff Boodosingh and involving Hostopia executive VP Paul Engels, HostMysite CEO Lou Honick, eleven2.com president and CEO Rodney Giles and TechPad Agency executive Derek Vaughn.

Panelists examined theories for marketing Web hosting, offering advice on banner advertising, organic SEO, PPC advertising and a variety of other marketing considerations for Web hosting providers.

Most of the panelists agreed that it can be difficult to produce a real return from online marketing investments, including banner campaigns and search engine marketing. Many of the customers Web hosts seek aren't necessarily aware that they're looking for "Web hosting," and the best time to catch prospective customers is long before they start sifting through Google for a host.

Again the panelists agreed that the best way to reach this kind of customer was through the active development of a channel strategy - partnering with Web developers, systems integrators and local service providers to take advantage of established trust.

Marketing came up again at the "Hotshots in Hosting" seminar, which was moderated by theWHIR's director of business development and marketing Candice Rodriguez, and featured contributions from Christian Dawson, director of corporate development and marketing, Will Charnock of The Planet/EV1 Servers, Ted Smith, vice president of dedicated hosting at Peer 1 and Christopher Faulkner, CEO of C I Host.

While much of the discussion related specifically to the marketing material in the earlier session, panelists and audience questions steered the "Hotshots" discussion toward management and the ways in which Web hosts can meet customer demands while managing expectations.

Rather than passively allowing customer to evolve beyond their services, agreed the panelists, Web hosts should follow a customer's lifecycle, offering to help them upgrade, or downgrade, services as their needs change, before they begin to feel they've outgrown their host.

In Tuesday's Keynote presentation, Tucows CEO Elliott Noss and Linux Journal senior editor Doc Searls discussed "The Fifth Utility," Internet services, in a candid and relaxed discussion that challenged many of the notions of competition and consumption held by Internet service providers.

Noss said a small ISP's objective should not be acquiring more customers, but doing more for the customers it has. A service provider's relationship with its customers is its most powerful currency.

And Searls challenged the idea of the Internet service customer as consumer, calling the notion a relic of the era of TV service. Rather than consumers, he says, Internet users are all producers, contributing content of their own in a way that makes the accessing of the Internet an asymmetrical exercise.

The day concluded with receptions held by the California ISP Association and the Wireless Internet Service Providers Association.

And the conference continues Wednesday with vendor-sponsored sessions and a keynote panel, "Who Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up? Four Providers You Wish You Were (And How to Get There)."

Source: The WHIR