The first panel I attended this morning was the marathon two-hour marketing forum that ran from 9:00 a.m. until 11:00 a.m. and featured six panelists along with a moderator.
Specifically, those panelists included Amy Armitage of Lunarpages, David Dunlap of WebHostMagazine.com, Ben Fisher of TechPad Agency, Aaron Phillips of Layered Tech, Hartland Ross of eBridge Marketing Solutions and Derek Vaughan of HostMySite.com. The moderator was Brett Tabke of WebmasterWorld and PubCon.
Given the all-star cast and the monster time slot, the session got off to a pretty slow start – a bit of a repetition of an almost-the-same session with almost the same cast from last year’s HostingCon.
Partway through the discussion, though, things got hung up on this “social media” issue. That is, it veered away from questions like “how do you divide your budget between PPC and organic search?” and started to focus on how these companies incorporate things like Twitter, Facebook, Digg, LinkedIn and all of the many various things that fall under the social media umbrella.
There was a split over that question, with several people (particularly Tabke) singing the praises of Twitter and urging hosts to use these new tools to drive traffic, and several panelists (particularly Vaughan and Phillips) saying they don’t see the returns from this kind of effort.
I’m not going to rehash the conversation wholesale here. But it seemed like a good jumping off point for some discussion of some of the big social media tools and their possible marketing impact on your business.
First of all, there are certain things that might not fall under the general umbrella of “social media” but that do effectively serve some of those functions. Blogs and forums are great ways for companies to interact with customers and maintain and strengthen those relationships. Sure. This much is pretty much a given. But I’m skeptical about the extents to which those efforts need to be expanded to include every possible venue for pursuing that kind of contact.
Is Twitter cool? Maybe. It’s definitely popular. But it’s probably worth noting that some of the most successful hosting folks in the room (Phillips, Vaughan and HostMySite’s Lou Honick) were all pretty vocally skeptical of its importance.
The community building features of social media seem, to a certain extent, to enable a hosting company to market in a somewhat new, somewhat interesting way to its existing customers. Whether that turns into a real tangible ROI is where I have my doubts.
On top of that, there’s a real question of how genuine these efforts by Web hosts to involve themselves in social media might be. Do customers really crave “Facebook friend” style access to their hosting providers? If these hosting providers just pay lip service to their social media efforts, there’s not much value in that at all.
I think that’s an important point, too.
I ran into Ben Fisher in the hall a couple hours after the presentation (he mentioned, by the way, that the session was organized largely by TechPad and that they purposely set out to sort of pit the marketing company people against the web hosting company people). And I told him that I wished they’d given the proponents versus opponents of social media disagreement a little more room to grow. But he pointed out that companies like LunarPages and DreamHost have carved out a real niche as companies that embrace these kinds of technologies – that there’s an actual market for companies that make a genuine effort to use this stuff.
That’s part of it, but there’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg question there. LunarPages and DreamHost are companies that are appreciated specifically for their efforts to be transparent, and to be engaging and to make themselves available to customers in a personal-relationship sort of way. I think their success, and their niche, is more a function of that attitude than of any particular tool being used.
One more thing I took away from that conversation, however, surprised me in that it left me feeling more positive than I expected about the marketing potential of these social media tools. Basically, I started thinking “why not?”
Why not make yourself available via LinkedIn? Why not create a Facebook group, even if it’s just for those few people who want to engage with your company in that specific way? Why not use Twitter? None of these things is particularly difficult to do, or requires an overwhelming amount of investment of labor to maintain. It might be pretty simple to create a return on investment when the investment is so small.
I might not be 100 percent convinced, but I’m not quite as dismissive as I was this morning.
I’d be pretty interested to hear if there are any readers out there that have had really positive experiences trying to market their hosting businesses with social media tools. Post in the comment section if you have.
About Liam Eagle
Liam Eagle has worked as a contributor to the Web Host Industry Review since its inception in 2000, and as editor since 2003. He has been editor of the WHIR's print magazine since its launch. His daily involvement in the gathering and reporting of Web hosting news and his regular interaction with Web hosting leaders gives him an uncommonly broad appreciation of the issues and tends facing the business. Through his WHIR blog, Liam spots Web hosting trends and offers opinions on the industry-wide impacts of major developments and the motivation behind big announcements. Follow him on Twitter @liameagle
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