Social Network as a CRM

I've spent a lot of my time at work over the last 4-5 years working on lead generation and lead management or customer relationship management systems. As social networks became more and more prevalent and more integrated in peoples web habits it occurred to me that many features of a social network could easily be adapted to function as lead management.

The first thing you need to do is classify people. Typically in a simple system you would have something like prospects(people how you know of but haven't contacted directly), contacted leads, qualified lead, not qualified leads, buyers. If I was to implement this in facebook I would have to use the list tool in friends (I think there used to be better ways but that was the old facebook). You could make a list for each category and assign people appropriately.

Once you have your lists sorted you can now use the system to deliver targeted messages to each lead category using the facebook inbox tools. As a person moves along the buying process you can move them into a new list and remove them from the old list.

The essentials are really classification and communication. Social networks typically contain these tools and that's how you can adapt them for CRM use. Of course some system may be more useful than others and I only use facebook as an example. Ultimately marrying social network features into a CRM would be extremely useful for many businesses.

Dreamhost vs Bluehost

I've been a Dreamhost user for a number of years and I can honestly say I like their setup, but in recent months there has definately been a lot of downtime and server errors (I think due to overloading). This has lead me to trying Bluehost which a number of people recommended to me. Below I will do a little comparison.

Price
I got my Dreamhost account for a smokin deal. It was their one day president's day sale and I paid about $15 for a year of hosting with free domain. The current rate seems to be $8.95/month up from the rates charged over the last couple of years.

Bluehost has pricing at $4.95/month for a one year term ($3.95 on 2 years), if you get to Bluehost via a referral account the price will show as $6.95 to pay those referral fees I guess.

Control Panel
Dreamhost uses a custom control panel which although not the prettiest, it has excellent features. In particular the options for domain management include hooking into various google services and have automated processes for domain cloaking, mirroring and redirecting. They also create individual folders for each domain or subdomain which can really help when setting up some sites. Their DNS control is also good allowing you to change more than just MX records.

Bluehost uses a version of Cpanel, the biggest strength I see is the script installer (simple scripts) It's very easy to get a decent package installed with little effort. The list of scripts is considerably larger than Dreamhost's set, and includes Concrete5 which I do a lot of work with.

FTP
It may just be me but my FTP access to Dreamhost seems to always need me to kill ftp connections to get a large number of files up. Also you don't get anonymous FTP on Dreamhost for free, it's an additional $3.95/month for that feature. Each dreamhost ftp user uploads to a seperate directory on the server to give access to that directory their is only one user and password.

Load Time
As I noted in the opening paragraphs Dreamhost used to perform well for me. If you have a static html site it would still be very fast. The issue seems to be data driven sites with a lot of php processing. When it comes to the concrete5 sites I've built Bluehost is much consistently much faster in page loading time than Dreamhost.

Customer Service
I've only used Bluehost customer service once and it was only adequate. I have used Dreamhost on several occassions and usually have to reply to the ticket at least once for them to solve my problems, which is usually a problem with their system.

In the end, I did like Dreamhost but so far Bluehost appears to be better where it really counts. Having a fast reliable site is really what I want from my hosting company.

3 Days to Voice Mail Down

Well it only took 3 days before our Primus system had problems. The voice mail is gone. It disappeared from our web control panel, is no longer accessible on the phone and doesn't pick up.

Perhaps this is retribution for the way I filled in the customer satisfaction surveys they sent me when I was still trying to get the service working in the first place.

Whatever the case, I now wait for their technical support to re-enable the voicemail function. I hope it all stabilizes soon, then I may write about some new topics.

Primus Talkbroadband softphone

After several hours of calling customer service, technical support and customer service again, I finally have my primus VoIP service running.
To be fair all the trouble was caused by the initial sales person misspelling my name and email address.

Initial testing of the phone seems to have a very clear sound and some really great features at the $9.95/month plan, including the voicemail to email function and "find me follow me" function.

So even though the support/service was a bit of a gong-show the product seems to be alright for the price. I guess we will test reliability in the coming months.