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By: OpenSRS Team on October 18th, 2007
Posted in: Events
Tags: ISPCON 2007
Comments: 2

ISPCON day two had a diverse lineup in the business track of its conference: after analyzing decision making processes and hiring procedures, the day ended with Guerrilla Marketing for Service Providers, led by Larry Loebig, director of the Guerrilla Marketing Association.

Larry had everyone in the room thinking twice about their current marketing plans by the end of his session. He reminded us that “marketing is everything we do to communicate about our service, products or business.” He focused on the objectives of marketing – prospecting, raising awareness – and bucking the traditional plans of putting together some advertising, sending out a direct mail shot and waiting for the phone to ring. Larry explained the need to use a broad mix of guerrilla marketing tools if you want to cut through the noise of the other 2,999 marketing messages the average consumer is hit with in a day and make yourself stand out.

A proper marketing mix hinges on first identifying your company’s differential advantage:

• What makes you different
• How do you stand out from the herd
• Mindshare – how you capture and retain the attention of your customers
• WIFM (“What’s In It For Me?”)
• Core Story – the essence of what you can offer your customer that they can’t get anywhere else

Guerrilla marketing is about process, not events. It’s based on psychology, not guessing. You need to invest time, energy, imagination and knowledge to craft a sustainable way to communicate your message. Guerrilla marketing offers up to 200 weapons (everything from marketing plans to logos to community involvement) that companies can use to maximize message delivery and retention. Speaking of marketing plans, here are the core questions Larry recommends every seven-step marketing plan cover:

• What is the purpose of your marketing?
• How will you achieve your purpose?
• Who is your target audience and what do you want them to do?
• What marketing weapons will you use?
• What is your niche in the marketplace and what are your differential advantages?
• What is your identity?
• What your marketing budget as a percentage of projected gross sales?

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By: OpenSRS Team on October 17th, 2007
Posted in: Events
Tags: ISPCON 2007
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My first day of the ISPCON conference ended back in the area of hosting, at a session called Strategies for Growing Your Hosted Business. It was co-presented by Ravi Agarwal, CEO of groupSPARK and Rich Bader, president and CEO of EasyStreet Online Services.

Both Ravi and Rich shared insight into the evolution of their businesses, giving hints about what helped them along the way. Rich promoted the outsourcing of services – like email – to partners to help efficiently provide services to a growing customer base. He also talked about maintaining a presence in the business community (EasyStreet does it through their business blogger and event sponsorships), to stay connected to the group of people that helped propel the company’s growth in its infancy.

Ravi spoke about the growing market of SaaS (Software as a Service) applications and how they will continue to broaden the opportunities in the world of Web 2.0. He also spoke about the benefits of exchange hosting and enterprise messaging:

• Exchange Hosting:
  • Anywhere access to full Outlook data
  • Collaboration accomplishes more
  • Gives peace of mind
  • Better ROI than on-premise management

• Enterprise Messaging
  • Growing suite of apps
  • Add $20/user/month of new revenue
  • Start selling fast

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By: OpenSRS Team on October 17th, 2007
Posted in: Events
Tags: ISPCON 2007
Comments: 1

Mid-morning brought an inspirational business session titled Choosing to be Great Instead of Big, led by Layne Sisk, president of The Plus Group. His talk was about focusing your efforts on satisfying key groups of people rather than appealing to mass audiences. Layne used five ways to be “great” to illustrate his point:

• Great in your customers eyes
  • Not just in customer service, be great from their perspective
  • Make the relationship personal
  • Make your customers a branch of your marketing department

• Great in quality
  • If you don’t believe in quality, you’ll never produce it
  • Get customer feedback to gauge quality levels

• Great in community
  • Participate in/set up community involvement programs
  • Get involved in what you truly care about

• Great place to work
  • Promote a culture of intimacy
  • Make pay a secondary reason for people to work for you

• Great for you
  • Make your business something you love; it becomes like your second family

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By: OpenSRS Team on October 16th, 2007
Posted in: Events
Tags: ISPCON 2007
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I’m new to Tucows and am in San Jose attending my first ISPCON.

The first morning of ISPCON Fall 2007 began with a series of sessions focused on the themes of wireless, hosting, technology, VOIP and business. Opting for a post-breakfast hosting topic, I headed to Using Social Networking and Web 2.0 to Market Your Business, led by Peter Radizeski of RAD-INFO, Inc., who was replacing John McKown, president & CEO of Delaware.net.

Peter’s seminar revolved around exploiting the opportunities within the world of Web 2.0 to raise the profile of your business. As he put it, “Web 2.0 is 15 minutes of fame that lasts a little longer.” Here are some of his key tips:

• Use tag words in blogs and profiles that are appropriate for your business – and repeat them for greater traction
• Residential ISPs need to provide a community for users to give them a reason to keep coming back (eg. After logging off of webmail, auto redirect users to your home page)
• Leave commenting enabled on blogs if possible – it encourages community
• Use applications internally before selling them to customers
• There is power in strategic partnerships – they can help strengthen your business as innovation progresses
• Never assume things are intuitive – always seek to share knowledge
• Always think from the customers’ perspective

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By: James Koole on October 16th, 2007
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Tags: ISPCON 2007
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One of the highlights of ISPCON (for me at least) are the keynotes. They provide a chance to hear some of the biggies in the Internet sector present their case on a variety of topics. The speaker for the first keynote of this ISPCON was Dave Schaeffer, CEO of Cogent Communications Inc. who spoke on the topic, “Neutrality’s Linchpin: Is bandwidth a commodity?” Schaeffer brought some strong opinions on the topic of net neutrality, and spoke a bit about the unique approach that Cogent has taken to providing Tier I network service.

Cogent is known around the world for very aggressive pricing and a unique approach that treats bandwidth as a commodity product. Cogent is the largest ethernet service provider in the U.S., and consistently ranks in the top five worldwide.

Schaeffer’s main point was that there needs to be a separation between the network and the application layers. So access providers should focus on providing high-quality Internet access to consumers, and not concern themselves with how the network is being used.

On the flip side, application providers, those building services that do things like provide video via the Internet, or voice communications, should focus solely on building the best possible applications without having to worry about competition from the access providers, or worrying about having their packets de-prioritized.

Schaeffer’s take on net neutrality boils down to this – provide more than enough bandwidth and each and every packet is treated as important as opposed to spending time and money trying to determine which packets need special treatment.

In his opinion, core network providers need to focus on providing high-quality bit transport at low costs, with no concern for how the bits are being used. For access providers that means coming to terms with a change in the business from selling a service over a dedicated network (like television channels or a dial-tone and minutes) to selling access to the Internet alone.

It means a pretty big shift in the communications sector, where access providers like the cable companies and telcos have been used to providing high-margin services through their networks while attempting to prevent other services from competing using that same network.

All in all it was a compelling discussion that kicked off ISPCON and will most likely kick-start some conversations at the bar and around the show floor in the coming days.