Instead of responding to comments individually I wanted to make one comment (and one comment only) to the responses to this article.
This is ONE of many strategies PeoplesHost employs to acquire customers. To address some questions or concerns others have mentioned in the comments made earlier:
- The blog post is authentic. Jack is someone we reached out to earlier today. He responded by complimenting the hustle and giving him inspiration to write that blog post.
- This is a manual human process and not automated or in bulk. Monitoring social media is a very tedious and timely process that we do on a daily basis.
- Yes, there are many who disagree with this approach as well as many who don't. We receive an equal share of people who respond in a positive light as well as those who call us ambulance chasers.
- Yes, no (hosting) company is perfect. Every hosting company will experience some sort of outage, disk failure, etc. at some point in time. It's inevitable and we understand that. When an event like this occurs, the web hosts should communicate and be honest with their customers base, which often times isn't the case. Customers are given the run around, canned responses, and shown a facade on social media that support is actually responsive when in fact all other support channels (live chat, phone, and tickets) the customer is left hanging where the public eye doesn't see.
Many of the vocal people we reach out to on social media are people who aren't receiving the support they deserve as a customer. These customers are taking to social media channels because they're receiving no updates or responses to their requests; it's their last resort to motivate their current provider to help them. For example, tickets going left unresponded to for many days. That's unacceptable and customers deserve better service. Many times, these customers are on their last string and ready for a move.
We understand that many of these targeted people run their businesses online and it's their livelihood. This is our livelihood too and we truly show our customers that we value them and their business..we wouldn't exist or be in business if it weren't for our customers. We've built a solid foundation of customers and built the company off the premise of exceptional and personal support.
- Some will see it as spam and others won't. We target these customers online who are 1) publically pleading/crying for help 2) have their domains listed on their profile and 3) have no private registration on their domain. This allows us to find their information in the public WHOIS database (again, it's a manual and timely process) and reach out via email, twitter, or directly on their website’s contact form.
- We are not desperate and have a very healthy customer base. Our reviews speak for themselves.
- Many of you may or may not know how competitive the hosting landscape is or how the industry works. Larger conglomerates (I won't name names) spend upwards to $200+ to acquire shared hosting customers via paid search, affiliates, and reviews.
Generally speaking, most consumers don't understand that the "review" sites they trust and rely on are getting paid $200+ for any referral sent to the hosts listed on their top 10 charts. These charts are solely based on who (which hosting company) is willing to pay the most for a referral and/or which host converts the best earning that review site or affiliate the most commission. We simply thought of a new way to target customers in a way that doesn't break the bank.
With that said, it is very enlightening to see other's thoughts on the subject in a public forum.
I wouldn't call this spam. Specifically because it is prompted and truly individualized.
Moreover, they use only intentionally public info (twitter and whois).
They also aren't pushing hard, this is essentially the softest sales-pitch that is actually a pitch.
I would call it Unsolicited Commercial Email, because that's precisely what it is.
I suppose you could philosophically contort a meaning by which "it's not really spam if you squint", but if I get that garbage in my GMail I hammer that "report as spam" button so fast, and encourage everyone else to do likewise.
Beyond the semantics, the meaningful difference to me lies in the targeting. This was targeted by a human and very specifically. It was also targeted at a business.
I see a big contrast between this and high-volume automated advertising sent to any email the sender could get his hands on. Even more so because business can benefit from such unsolicited email. Unsolicited email to consumers / personal mail is worse in my opinion.
If I tweet something and someone tries to email me to sell me something about it, that's completely spam and I will continue to mark it as such and advocate that others mark it as such. How the hell is that not spam?
Instead of responding to comments individually I wanted to make one comment (and one comment only)
That's not how this works. I mean, you can do whatever you want, but if you show up to a discussion, give a long rant, and then leave, I'm definitely labeling your comment a PR stunt and adding your company to my "never do business with them" list.
I think they were making a point that they were going to clarify these things but didn't want to get involved in arguing online.
I also wouldn't exactly call that a rant, I call that a bullet-point explanation of their logic. Personally I'm grateful to them for clarifying things. Until that point I had multiple people making comments about how I couldn't tell a bot from a human.
Comments
Hello Everyone,
Instead of responding to comments individually I wanted to make one comment (and one comment only) to the responses to this article.
This is ONE of many strategies PeoplesHost employs to acquire customers. To address some questions or concerns others have mentioned in the comments made earlier:
- The blog post is authentic. Jack is someone we reached out to earlier today. He responded by complimenting the hustle and giving him inspiration to write that blog post.
- This is a manual human process and not automated or in bulk. Monitoring social media is a very tedious and timely process that we do on a daily basis.
- Yes, there are many who disagree with this approach as well as many who don't. We receive an equal share of people who respond in a positive light as well as those who call us ambulance chasers.
- Yes, no (hosting) company is perfect. Every hosting company will experience some sort of outage, disk failure, etc. at some point in time. It's inevitable and we understand that. When an event like this occurs, the web hosts should communicate and be honest with their customers base, which often times isn't the case. Customers are given the run around, canned responses, and shown a facade on social media that support is actually responsive when in fact all other support channels (live chat, phone, and tickets) the customer is left hanging where the public eye doesn't see.
Many of the vocal people we reach out to on social media are people who aren't receiving the support they deserve as a customer. These customers are taking to social media channels because they're receiving no updates or responses to their requests; it's their last resort to motivate their current provider to help them. For example, tickets going left unresponded to for many days. That's unacceptable and customers deserve better service. Many times, these customers are on their last string and ready for a move.
We understand that many of these targeted people run their businesses online and it's their livelihood. This is our livelihood too and we truly show our customers that we value them and their business..we wouldn't exist or be in business if it weren't for our customers. We've built a solid foundation of customers and built the company off the premise of exceptional and personal support.
- Some will see it as spam and others won't. We target these customers online who are 1) publically pleading/crying for help 2) have their domains listed on their profile and 3) have no private registration on their domain. This allows us to find their information in the public WHOIS database (again, it's a manual and timely process) and reach out via email, twitter, or directly on their website’s contact form.
- We are not desperate and have a very healthy customer base. Our reviews speak for themselves.
- Many of you may or may not know how competitive the hosting landscape is or how the industry works. Larger conglomerates (I won't name names) spend upwards to $200+ to acquire shared hosting customers via paid search, affiliates, and reviews.
Generally speaking, most consumers don't understand that the "review" sites they trust and rely on are getting paid $200+ for any referral sent to the hosts listed on their top 10 charts. These charts are solely based on who (which hosting company) is willing to pay the most for a referral and/or which host converts the best earning that review site or affiliate the most commission. We simply thought of a new way to target customers in a way that doesn't break the bank.
With that said, it is very enlightening to see other's thoughts on the subject in a public forum.
"We're spammers, but we work really hard at it!"
I wouldn't call this spam. Specifically because it is prompted and truly individualized. Moreover, they use only intentionally public info (twitter and whois).
They also aren't pushing hard, this is essentially the softest sales-pitch that is actually a pitch.
I would call it Unsolicited Commercial Email, because that's precisely what it is.
I suppose you could philosophically contort a meaning by which "it's not really spam if you squint", but if I get that garbage in my GMail I hammer that "report as spam" button so fast, and encourage everyone else to do likewise.
Beyond the semantics, the meaningful difference to me lies in the targeting. This was targeted by a human and very specifically. It was also targeted at a business.
I see a big contrast between this and high-volume automated advertising sent to any email the sender could get his hands on. Even more so because business can benefit from such unsolicited email. Unsolicited email to consumers / personal mail is worse in my opinion.
It is not completely Unsolicited because the client has asked for help on twitter.
If I tweet something and someone tries to email me to sell me something about it, that's completely spam and I will continue to mark it as such and advocate that others mark it as such. How the hell is that not spam?
That's not how this works. I mean, you can do whatever you want, but if you show up to a discussion, give a long rant, and then leave, I'm definitely labeling your comment a PR stunt and adding your company to my "never do business with them" list.
I think they were making a point that they were going to clarify these things but didn't want to get involved in arguing online.
I also wouldn't exactly call that a rant, I call that a bullet-point explanation of their logic. Personally I'm grateful to them for clarifying things. Until that point I had multiple people making comments about how I couldn't tell a bot from a human.
Thanks for commenting and clarifying things :)
You summed it all up. Nice work.