Towards the end of Tier 1 Research's hosting conference (Andy and the Dans are really awesome speakers, but I wish David Snead had been there to run the panels. David is the king of moderating trade secrets out of panelists), I had a brief conversation with the CEO of a prominent hosting company. I'll call him X.
X wants to increase signups by 50%, and he's willing to give his marketing team whatever budget they need to make it happen. He thinks many of his customers are developers. Of web apps, you know? As for what kinds of apps those are, or how they're used (within the developer's company? By some third party to whom the developer sells the app? The general public?), he's not quite sure.
Shortly thereafter I ran into a former client who thinks most of his low end customers are 'small businesses'. I've been telling him that there isn't necessarily any correlation between a company's headcount/revenue and its hosting requirements, but he doesn't believe me. I want him to create a 'venture capitalist' role within his sales organization, so that someone mines his customer database for promising opportunities. At the very least he'll end up with some info on who these small businesses are, and what kinds of sites and apps they have.
(According to John Lee's HostingCon slides, that's how Hostway discovered Fox News among its $20/month customers and grew the relationship into a 100+ server account. Which gives Hostway a case study to market to other media companies with.)
In the latest issue of Business 2.0 there's an article on Amazon.com. The company promoted The Stolen Child, an unknown novel that it's turned into a bestseller. And now it's optioned the film rights. Business 2.0 says Amazon can tell from its traffic and sales data what people will pay to see. It can probably selectively pitch the movie to just the customers who would most likely be interested, and extrapolate high potential marketing media by studying this group. That'd be way cheaper than advertising on prime time TV and in major newspapers.
I think every web hosting company ought to work on imitating the close tabs Amazon keeps on its customers. It'd only be fair, given Amazon's entrance into the web hosting market.
PS - Speaking of knowing your customers, Business 2.0 also has an article on BlueLithium:
BlueLithium serves up 8 billion ad impressions a month to 100 million users. Each of those ads drops a cookie on your browser, and when you show up on another site that serves BlueLithium ads, or one of its advertisers' websites, it adds that history of clicks to its database. Using this 'clickstream' data, it determines within 10 milliseconds which ad to serve up.
"The more we see you, the more we know about you," the company's founder says. He tracks not only what ads you click on, but also the behavior of other people with similar clickstreams.
And last but not least, Applied Location is working on a satellite-based system that can pinpoint every GPS-enabled car's location to within 1.5 meters. The company proposes to use this technology for utility-based tolls, parking fees and insurance.
Knowledge is efficiency.
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