MSN part of Microsoft or its own brand?

Posted: September 9, 2005

Like many SEMs, I receive weekly phone calls at home and the office from MSN headhunters. For a year and a half, they’ve been calling weekly (different offices, different phone numbers - although the Philly office seems the most aggressive) and weekly I’ve been telling them no.

Over a casual conversation with MSN about the new PPC product, they asked me how I hire new employees. With a coy smile, I told them that those are secrets I can’t reveal. MSN and Google are the largest hiring competitors in Chicago, and they’re two companies I don’t want to go head to head with for new employees.

Then I brought up the headhunter phone calls, and the fact that they’re much more aggressive than I am - they should be able to recruit satellite office workers. The MSN guys told me that their biggest need was customer support. They’re trying to figure out how to work customer support for thousands, and potentially millions of new self serve advertisers for their PPC offering.

Then my absolute favorite MSN quote occurred. One of the MSN guys, who I’ll let remain anonymous, turned to me and said, “When it’s all said and done, we’re still part of Microsoft. We have no idea how to do customer support. Our PPC product is done. We like it. We’re ready to roll it out. We can’t until we figure out customer support.”

What an admission; and a very honest one at that.

With this attitude, which has been echoed by many MSN employees of: “We know what we’re good at; we know where our weaknesses lie; we’re going to fix the weaknesses before we go to market with a search engine marketing product.”

Like most people, I’ve had endless conversations with a Microsoft employee which went something like ‘I know my computer is plugged in. Yes, I know I’m online. Yes, I’ve already read the help files on your website, stop searching them and give me the next tier of customer support.”

With the very different attitudes between MSN and Microsoft about customer support, product offerings, etc - MSN is going to market with almost its own brand apart from Microsoft. It might be owned by the same company - but the attitude that is prevalent among the employees gives one an entirely different feel when dealing with them.

It’s a very humble attitude - one I’m not akin to hearing from Microsoft.

Let’s hope this trend continues. It would be nice to see one humble Search Engine on the web.

I was having a casual conversation with MSN about customer support. This stemmed from the weekly phone calls I receive from their headhunters wishing me to apply at MSN. You’d think after telling them no for a year and a half, someone would get the hint.

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