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?

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

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

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

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.

Tomorrow marks the start of ISPCON Fall 2007, a major conference for internet service providers and hosting services. We’re going to have a number of people there: our VP of Product Management and Marketing, product managers, developers and our communications. Come on over, get to know both us and our services!

ISPCON runs from Tuesday, October 16th to Thursday, October 18th at San Jose McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, California.

Tucows Presentations and Sessions

30 Rapid-fire Website Wins, Guaranteed (Wednesday, E4, 8:45 a.m. - 9:45 a.m.)

See the master in action! Ken Schafer, our fast and furious VP of Product Management and Marketing will fire off 30 ways to improve your site to better drive your business and give you an “unfair advantage” over the competition. This conference comes with Ken’s guarantee: “If, at the end of the session, you don’t feel you have at least five techniques that will improve YOUR site, Ken will personally assess your site and give you five ways to improve it!”

Email Nightmares: Tales from the Edge (Wednesday, F2, 11:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.)

Join Product Manager Kim Phelan as she talks about the nightmares of provisioning email — from the guy with 100,000 messages in his inbox to the mom using her “unlimited” email account to store thousands of digital photos. She’ll talk about some of the edge case horror stories that we’ve seen in our experience as an email provider and tell you why outsourcing email could be one of the best business decisions you can make.

Our Booth

We’ll be at booth 302, which is pretty easy to spot from the exhibit floor entrance. We’ll be in the front aisle — just go left as soon as you go through the entrance. We’ll be more than happy to give you a demo of our email service, talk to you about any of our services and we’ll also have t-shirts and squishy cows on hand for you to take!

Conference Coverage

Watch this blog for reports and updates from ISPCON — we’ll be blogging from the conference with coverage of our events from our communications team.

I wanted to share some thoughts with all of you on a dark day in Internet history. On October 15th the price of a .com will increase by $0.42, marking the first price increase in the history of the modern Internet. Worse, this now signals a near-annual event that will take place in all major gTLDs. It is simply wrong. My full comments in the public forum in Puerto Rico in June are here.

While I do think Verisign has shown a lack of stewardship of this key public resource, I lay the primary blame for this on ICANN staff who put this forward and on ICANN board members who voted for this (it should be noted that the vote was 9-5. One of the closest in ICANN annals). As I said in Puerto Rico, shame on you. We all, all of us involved in the ICANN process in any way, owe the Internet public because of this.

It is important that we do not use this as a sign that ICANN, the idea, is failing. We should not confuse bad execution with bad strategy. The role of ICANN as an example of truly global, not International, governance is important. The role of ICANN in keeping the Internet free from government control and by that the predation of special interests is vital.

And it is a challenging environment. There is a debate inside the Registrar constituency right now, effectively re-fighting a battle that was already won, but sloppily implemented by staff. Many of you (the “you” here is our customers) will have already dealt with the end-user problems created by Go Daddy and Network Solutions in their “interpretation” of transfers policy in the name of “security”. For me this is simply deja vu.

Service providers, there is something you can do. Something important. There has been a process of GNSO reform going on inside of ICANN for the last 18 months. The GNSO is the primary policy-making body in the ICANN process. They are the ones charged with making policy for gTLDs. The board only has the power to ratify policy. Staff only has power to enforce and interpret policy.

Inside of the GNSO there has been something of a stalemate for the last few years. One of the chief reasons is that the Internet Service Providers Constituency (”ISPC”) has consistently sided with the Intellectual Property Constituency (”IPC”) on things like whois access and new gTLDs. I have been in and around the ISP industry now for 13 years and the ISPC does not look like any ISP assembly that I know.

I have been advocating change in the GNSO reform discussions. In Lisbon in March and again in Puerto Rico in June I have advocated a recasting of the ISPC. My position is that it should be a constituency for companies who stand between the “contracting parties” (ICANN-speak for Registrars) and end users. Most of the industry calls these people resellers (an old OpenSRS anachronism). They have no place or voice in the ICANN process right now and they need one. We have been trying to advocate their interests (your interests) for years. You can do a better job of it than we can.

When it comes to transfers, to whois and to most issues of DNS policy they (YOU!) are a voice that needs to be heard.

My advocating is the easy part of the battle. The harder part will be to actually have some of you folks do it. So take this as a plea to storm the ramparts! Now! In the next couple days we will post more about the ISPC, what can be done, and how to do it here. The time commitment is VERY small and the impact can be very large. Just ask George Kirikos what a little effort can accomplish in the ICANN process!

As providers of a high-performance, low-cost, robust and convenient email service, we’d be remiss if we didn’t provide some tips on using email more effectively.

If you’re trying to get the most out of your email (or any other “productivity tool”, for that matter), I strongly recommend the tips provided at 43 Folders, Merlin Mann’s excellent site devoted to “personal productivity, life hacks, and simple ways to make your life a little better”. Merlin’s a follower of David Allen’s Getting Things Done system, and in the article Five fast email productivity tips, he’s got these simple tips that should help you better manage a ballooning inbox:

1. Turning off your email client’s “auto check” feature, or slowing it down so it checks for new mail less often — perhaps every 20 minutes or even only once an hour. “If you’re doing anything with new email more than every few minutes, you might want to rethink your approach.”
2. Pick off easy ones. “If you can retire an email with a 1-2 line response (< 2 minutes; pref. 30 seconds), do it now. Remember: this is about action, not about cogitating and filing. Get it off your plate, and get back to work."
3. Write less. “Stop imagining that all your emails need to be epic literature; get better at just keeping the conversation moving by responding quickly and with short actions in the reply. Ask for more information, pose a question, or just say “I don’t know.” Stop trying to be Marcel Proust…”
4. Cheat. If you find yourself constantly sending emails that have the same general structure, consider creating some “form letter” templates that you can fill in quickly. See if there’s software like MailTemplate for your operating system.
5. Be honest. “If you know in your heart that you’re never going to respond to an email, get it out of sight, archive it, or just delete it. Guilt will not make you more responsive two months from now, otherwise, you’d just do it now, right? Trust your instincts, listen to them, and stop trying to be perfect.”

If you’re not the sort of person who likes to change their routine all at once, I suggest you try tips 2 (”Pick off the easy ones”) and 5 (deleting any mail that you know you’ll never respond to or for which you keep putting off responding). These two alone should take care of a significant chunk of your inbox and make you feel less anxious about what David Allen calls “open loops” — those undone things that keep tugging at you throughout the day.

Monday, October 8th is Canadian Thanksgiving, which means that our headquarters in Toronto will be operating on holiday hours. Here’s a schdule showing which departments will be open:

Our normal hours will resume on Tuesday, October 9. Have a safe and enjoyable holiday!

In an infamous episode of the American sitcom Seinfeld, comedian Jerry Seinfeld asked the question, “Are you master of your domain?” Of course, he wasn’t quite talking about domain names, but the question is a good one, none the less.

When it comes to domain names, it’s important to treat them as valuable assets and nothing less. While maintaining a presence online isn’t expensive ($10 per year for the domain name, plus about a few dollars a month in hosting costs), websites are often in reality important tools worth far more than those limited costs might indicate.

Every now and then I get a call from someone who has “lost control” of their domain name. The story usually goes something like this: the person on the phone didn’t know much about the Internet but needed to get either a basic website online, or needed to have an email account with a personal customized email address for their business. The person asked an Internet-savvy friend to register the domain name and get hosting arranged. To save time and to avoid any hassles, that well-meaning Internet-savvy person simply registered the domain name (sometimes in their own name) and got the site up and running. No worries, right?

To quote Seinfeld again, “Serenity now! Insanity later.”

What generally happens is this: a year passes by and the domain name expires. At this point, the person who thinks they own the domain name calls to find out why their site is offline. They haven’t received any renewal notices because the administrative email address is either incorrect, or they don’t have access to it.

Getting the site back online then turns into something of a complicated task. In many cases the “owner” of the domain has no idea where the domain was registered, let alone the username and password required to change the administrative contact information.

Of course all of this could be avoided had the person treated the domain name as something of value and ensured that they understood the process and maintained control. Here’s some tips to ensure that domain buyers are well served and will be “masters of their domains.”

• For domain buyers: If you are registering a domain name, do some research to make sure you understand the process, what you are getting for your money and what your responsibilities are.
• For tech-savvy friends: If you are registering a domain name for someone else, don’t. Instead, take the time to explain why it’s a bad idea. By all means, walk the person through the process, but make sure you explain that they have certain responsibilities to ensure the domain remains theirs. Make sure to register the domain in the name of the owner, and make sure relevant information like URLs for control panels and the all important username and password are given to the domain owner for safekeeping.
• For domain name sellers and hosting companies: Make sure you’re doing a good job explaining domain buying process, and ensure that you communicate the differences between hosting and domain names. Explain the importance of guarding usernames and passwords, and most importantly, of keeping Whois information and that all important administrative email address up to date.