The Elephant In The Room

You work in an intense competitive environment. Customers are always comparing your services and your prices to others’. When you mess up, there’s a pretty good chance you’re going to get defectors. When a competitor messes up, there’s a good chance you’re going to benefit.

So what do you do when a competitor messes up big? Maybe they have a huge outage. Maybe they get caught up in a legal battle. Maybe a senior employee ends up strangling a giraffe to death. Or just smacking around a monkey.

It is really tempting to call attention to the situation and position yourself as the antidote.

Just a few warnings:

Remember that you had your own mess ups in the past and will likely have them in the future. You will have outages. Maybe you once kicked a pigeon. Avoid inviting scrutiny and retaliation that will ultimately hurt you.

Be careful not to appear too opportunistic. If you suddenly start donating 10% of your revenues to save porcupines, it might seem more exploitative than generous. Maybe not. Sometimes the outrage is so great and the opportunity is so right. Also, honesty, creativity and humor can go a long way. Just be aware of the risk.

Stay on message. You work hard to stand for something. Great service. Innovation. Reliability. If you leap to a very different message because it’s trending on Twitter, you could sacrifice clarity and you might not be playing to your own strengths.

Having said all that, a competitor’s stumble is certainly an opportunity to step up your game. Their customers are going to come looking for alternatives. Make it simple for people to switch. Pound home the benefits of your service. Do all the things you likely do anyway. Just think about using this as an excuse to do them a bit better.

Canadian Small and Medium Business get a leg up from Google

Yesterday, small and medium size businesses (SMBs) in Canada got a gift from Google to jump start their business presence online. Hosted by Kevin O’Leary of Dragon’s Den at the historical Fermenting Cellar, in the Distillery district in Toronto, Canada, SMBs can now get a website & .CA domain for free as part of the “Canada Get your Business online” (GYBO) initiative.

Partnering with Yola inc., CIRA, The Globe and Mail, Rogers, Canadian Chamber of Commerce, and Silver Lining Ltd, Google wants to shrink the gap between SMBs lack of online presence and their customers who are using the internet to find them. “Over the next year, we hope to help 100,000 Canadian businesses build websites and reach customers online” says Chris O’Neill, Managing Director Google Canada.

According to Google, there are over 2 million SMBs in Canada, and close to half have no presence online. These rock stars of the Canadian economy need the help to be where their customers are looking for them and this initiative gets them one step closer.

As someone who has been in online marketing for over 11 years, I am extremely excited to see the GYBO.ca program launched. SMBs struggle with lack of time, resources, amongst other challenges of starting a business and this initiative helps them conquer one important challenge, and that is an online web presence, with a price tag of FREE. We work with many SMBs, as our resellers do, and can relate to the challenges, so having a program that is focused on helping SMBs is fantastic.

Congratulations to Google, Yola, CIRA and the other partners who are giving small and medium businesses in Canada a leg up! Also, a special Thank you to Rogers for drawing my name to win a Blackberry Torch!

If you’d like more information, go to www.gybo.ca

Announcing Comodo and Trustwave SSL products, plus Lower Pricing on GeoTrust and thawte

Today we’re announcing a number of changes to the OpenSRS Trust Service to make it easier for you to sell SSL and trust products to your customers.

Here’s a portion of the official news release:

TORONTO, Mar. 16 – Tucows Inc. (NYSE AMEX:TCX) (TSX:TC), a global provider of domain names, email and other Internet services, announced today that its wholesale Internet services division, OpenSRS, has added Comodo® and Trustwave® Internet security products to the OpenSRS Trust Service. The addition of these two brands further extends and enhances the choice in trust and security products available to its over 11,000 resellers worldwide.

Along with adding new providers, OpenSRS also announced lower wholesale pricing on a number of GeoTrust® and thawte® brand SSL Digital Certificates. This cost decrease allows OpenSRS Resellers to better compete on price in an evolving market for online security and trust. Read the full release…

In short, here’s what we’re doing today:

New Vendors – Comodo and Trustwave!

Starting today, we now offer SSL products from two new vendors – Comodo and Trustwave – bringing you and your customers much more choice in SSL products. Adding these two vendors alongside our existing products from VeriSign, GeoTrust and thawte means there are now well over 20 different SSL products available across five vendors and at different feature and price points– all available to you through your single OpenSRS account.

Lower Pricing on some GeoTrust and thawte SSL Products

We’re also announcing new lower pricing on some SSL products from GeoTrust and thawte. This better pricing will help you out in what is becoming an increasingly competitive market for trust and SSL. Price charts on OpenSRS.com have been updated with the new, lower pricing, where indicated.

More Information

We’ve updated our Trust Service webpages with all the new information including updated product grids for all five brands. You’ll also find marketing materials including logos and other information for our new vendors, Comodo and Trustwave, along with existing materials for VeriSign, GeoTrust and thawte.

As mentioned, everything is already live in your OpenSRS Reseller account. Just log in to the Reseller Web Interface, then look for the Trust Manager link. Documentation has also been updated to reflect the addition of the new vendors and products.

New Control Panels Sneak Preview

Be careful! This is no ordinary blog post. You’re going to need some headphones with the volume turned way up and you’re going to want to be sitting down before you look at what we have to show you.

This is a post about our control panels. People say they’re ugly. This hurt our feelings at first, until we realized that over the past ten years, we’ve added more and more functionality to the control panels, without giving much thought around around how our resellers use them.

Sure, they’re powerful and since we cater to wholesale customers, they have a lot of functionality around the management of bulk domains. But feedback from newer resellers was the learning curve to the system was especially high.

We also learned through our reseller satisfaction surveys, that the design of our current control panels have been the majority of the complaints.

So that’s what we’ve been working on.

These quick video intros and previews are snapshots from our current development environment. That means some things might look different once the control panels are officially released. But we’re coming down the home stretch now and we just couldn’t wait to show them to you.

We believe these control panels, once released will go a long way in helping our resellers streamline how they register, renew, transfer, and manage their customers’ domain names and I couldn’t be happier to share them with you today.

Introducing… your new Domain control panel:

Read the rest of this entry »

International Pi Day Celebration: No Squares Allowed!

Just a reminder folks that March 14th is fast approaching. Do you have plans to celebrate?

We’re not talking about Einstein’s birthday (although I bet he’d be happy to know you remembered). We’re talking about International Pi Day, which happens every March 14 (3.14, get it?)

Pi Day has been celebrated by math enthusiasts and other geeks all over the world since 1988.

For the past few since we’ve been celebrating International Pi Day at OpenSRS, staffers, realizing the date is near will begin to salivate in what some experts have told us is a typical pavlovian response in reaction to the knowledge that a delivery of delicious pies will soon arrive to aid in the celebration!

This year Pi Day falls on Monday and as we gear up for the festivities, we wanted to ask you what plans you have to celebrate. If you’ve been a little pre-occupied, then this post can serve as an important reminder, because everybody likes pie!

If you’re having trouble thinking about how best to celebrate Pi Day, may we suggest a quick visit to your friendly neighbourhood app store for some reasonably priced Pi apps that might help put you in the Pi celebration mood? And if the mood still doesn’t strike (or if you’re using a Blackberry), give walking in circles a try. It worked for us!

Here’s wishing you a safe and Happy Pi Day!

iPhone and iPad Pi apps

Pi App: Unleash your inner nerd by testing how many digits of Pi you know!
Pi Cubed: Pi Cubed is a visual math application designed for a touch-based interface. Pi Cubed lets you construct, typeset, and instantly evaluate mathematical expressions using an interactive menu system.
Pi Search HD: Quickly and easily look for phone numbers, birthdays, lottery numbers, names and more, in the infinite numbers of Pi.
piClock: piClock scrolls through a ribbon of digits from the number pi to find the current time and date.

Pi Apps for Android

SpeedPi: How fast is your Android? Find out now using Speed Pi!
Pi (3.14159…): How many digits of Pi can you memorize?
Pimorize Pi Memorizer: Test your ability to remember the digits of Pi. Helps memorizing pi. Also shows days remaining until PI Day.
Pi Trainer: Learn pi or test your memory with Pi Trainer by piday.org. Pi Trainer is a simple game produced by piday.org as a tool to spread the knowledge of Pi.

Pi Apps for Blackberry

Sadly, we couldn’t find any Pi apps for the Blackberry. The app store also told us we should be running Windows to properly use the store. Not sure what that’s about. Sorry Blackberry fans, we tried!

More Pi Resources

Wikipedia entry for Pi Day.
The official Pi Day website at piday.org.
Pi Day photos on Flickr.

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