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Q&A: Tucows Marketing VP Ken SchaferTucows vice president of marketing and product management Ken Schafer discusses the release of a survey conducted at HostingCon in an email interview with the WHIR.
By Liam Eagle, theWHIR.com
August 28, 2008 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- HostingCon 2008 was the setting for a big marketing moment for Tucows (tucowsinc.com), which announced the re-launching of the OpenSRS (opensrs.com) brand as the name for the company's reseller services business - the part of the company's business most relevant to the hosting community.
At the company's booth, which sported the new branding, the company conducted a pen-and-paper survey among attendees who stopped by to avail themselves of the company's root beer floats.
Earlier this week, Tucows issued some of the results of the survey, pointing out, among other things, that hosting providers - though the vast majority of them are users of these tools - don't view social networking and web 2.0 services, what the announcement termed "functional hosting" services, as threats to their businesses.
In an email interview with the WHIR, Ken Schafer, the company's vice president of marketing and product mangaement, discussed the results of the survey, web hosts' attitudes toward web 2.0 services and his company's role in contributing to the business decisions of its resellers.
Could you describe in a bit more detail exactly what you set out to discover in conducting this survey?
Ken Schafer: You'll remember that we announced that we renamed our reseller service business OpenSRS at HostingCon 2008. We conducted this survey at our booth.
Being "reseller friendly" is more than a tagline on our logo, so we asked questions about the overall relationship people have with their domains and/or email provider.
We're also taking a progressive approach to the ongoing development of our reseller Domain and Email services. Email addresses and Domain Names are about identity. So we wanted to gather some intelligence from the industry that we can leverage for opportunities for our innovative Premium Names and Personal Names services.
At OpenSRS, we're also very interested in the development of hosted services. We believe there is value and opportunity for traditional hosts to capitalize on the immense success of functional hosts in attracting an entirely different demographic to the 'net.
One of the results seems to be that, while resellers acknowledge the Web 2.0 or social networking services by using them, they don't seem to view them as a threat. Is that the wrong idea? Do you have an opinion about the kind of threat these sorts of services pose to a small hosting business?
KS: Today, if someone wants to set themselves up as a small business (say an independent contractor/freelancer) they can be online for free in a matter of minutes using functional hosting services. The responses to the survey demonstrate that web hosting companies have yet to adapt their thinking to this reality. We believe there is a significant opportunity for web hosts to reposition themselves to this growing segment of Internet users.
Also, "Web 2.0/social networking" means a networked consumer with multiple opportunities to talk about their experiences with service providers. Hosting companies of all sizes need be aware that this reality has the potential to both boost and damage their reputation.
In terms of the influence you hope this information will have, is there a sales pitch associated with this, or is it more of a matter of OpenSRS sort of shepherding its resellers to a greater awareness of certain market conditions?
KS: We're actively looking for ways to help our resellers. We want to start a conversation about emerging trends and opportunities. There's no hard sales pitch behind this survey.
Obviously, given the conditions of the survey (a paper survey at your HostingCon booth), not everybody who participated was a customer. How successful has it been as a means of generating leads for possible new resellers, assuming that was part of the intent?
KS: The face-to-face conversations we had with our current customers, industry peers and prospective resellers while at HostingCon is where we get the most value from our participation.
The press release also says "73 percent of all domain name resellers enjoy working with their provider" and points to some of the general complaints as "poor communication or support" and "lack of the full range of services their customers want." Do you have a sense of how that confidence or lack of confidence overlaps with OpenSRS resellers? Is there any potential there to mend or improve your own reseller relationships?
KS: I think we can always improve our relationships with our resellers. We've got an incredible track record with our OpenSRS resellers - 78 percent of the resellers who started with us in 1999, are still with us today. We've made significant investments in both reseller communication and support. That being said, we're always looking for ways to improve, which is why I think those responses are important learning for us.
Read Back Issues of WHIR Magazine
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This has been, for us, one of the most interesting, exciting and challenging build-ups to an issue of the magazine yet, Web Hosting's All Star Team. The balloting process was our first experiment with a kind of user participation we're planning to do a lot more with in the months to come. We had thousands of ballots submitted, with hundreds of write-in suggestions and a demonstration of user engagement that has us feeling super positive about the project.
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July 2009 - What am I Worth?
One of the interesting luxuries of working on a project like the printed WHIR magazine is that it allows us to play with things like our point of view from one issue to the next. In recent months we've been giving added attention to the kind of practical and applicable advice aimed at smaller hosts and resellers. This issue carries on with that point of view, asking, in our cover story, "what am I worth?" It's a complicated question without a clear-cut answer.
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May 2009 - The Blueprint for a Small Web Host
I was a little surprised by how difficult it became to see this idea through. We set out to assemble a blueprint for a small hosting business, but butted up pretty quickly against the general impossibility of covering all the territory that was out there to be covered. The basic constraints of a printed magazine, and the less-than-infinite amount of time we had available forced us to face the fact that we could never produce an exhaustive guide to starting a hosting company.
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