Watching the effects of social media slowly glaze over the web hosting industry is very interesting. I remember in 2003 when I first installed a forum for Surpass Hosting. I loved talking to customers and helping them as soon as they posted. Their immediate satisfaction gave me a very pleasing sense of accomplishment to make them happy and impress them, especially when other visitors could see! The forum quickly grew into a very important part of Surpass. I truly consider Surpass one of the first web hosts that had a strong sense of community and that trait is forever a glue holding together the company’s goals. Throughout the years I noticed other hosting companies adding forums but most never devoted the needed attention. Many forums would sit unattended and without much activity. While select hosts did try, others were either too corporate to have a forum, uninterested to have comments in public or just didn’t get it. In 2004, less than a year after being created, the Surpass forum’s name was changed to Surmunity to reflect our direction.
Fast forward to 2007, I stumbled across a little blue site called Twitter because, ironically, a customer in Surmunity linked to their personal Twitter account. I didn’t really understand what the craze was about or where it was all going, but there was definitely something engaging that needed to be latched on to – especially considering the existing, open personality of Surpass. Besides getting my own personal account, I also registered one for Surpass and started to test the waters of a new social pool.
Now in 2009, every host (and almost every person) has a Twitter account. If you didn’t get hooked a few years ago, you have likely surrendered or were pressured by now. Many hosts are using this opportunity superbly and follow up with customers normally within a few minutes (yes, that’s minutes, not hours). The personal attention customers are able to receive now is outstanding. If it wasn’t for Twitter, I am not sure how the majority of web hosts would have opened the social gates so easily. Twitter has inspired entirely new feelings for businesses, and not only web hosts. Customer driven question sites like UserVoice and GetSatisfaction seemed to have popped up only during this inspiring period of the tweet revolution. Companies no longer seemingly hide far away behind a helpdesk or phone call and if you want to talk to a CEO, there’s a good chance you can.
What does the future hold for this new wave of extreme customer satisfaction? If it’s not already amazing enough that a Ruby (er, I mean Scala) powered application called Twitter, often swimming with fail whales, is still attracting so much attention, anything could happen next to make customers even happier.
(And Twitter may really get slow from now on, Oprah has only had her Twitter account for three hours at the time of this posting. New sign ups will spread across the country like an uncontrollable virus. Cross your fingers.)
About Kayla Selans
As a director at Surpass Hosting, Kayla has experience in all areas of web hosting from conducting market research to securing server environments. Kayla has worked with Internet companies for ten years and has been involved in the web hosting industry since 2002. Under Kayla's direction, Surpass has reached record growth each year.
Through her theWHIR blog Kayla will focus on the benefits of attaining and maintaining a secure hosting environment as well as offer insight into the current and future state of the web hosting industry.
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