I just initiated a thread at the WebmasterWorld Domain Name Forum, where I am one of the moderators, entitled Moniker.com Now Down For About 19 Hours
One of my fellow WebmasterWorld volunteers, Tedster, just commented as follows:
In the past I recommended Moniker’s services every time the opportunity came up. Now I need to re-think, because any recommendation I make also affects MY reputation.
I, too, have for years recommended Moniker for good reason. Based upon feedback I have no doubt that I would qualify as an “influencer” – someone to whom people listened when making a decision about choosing where to register/move their domains. (And, no, I don’t get a toaster or free passes to anything, nor do I have an affiliate relationship of any kind.)
So what’s the lesson here?
- NOT communicating with your users can make a bad situation worse
- NOT reaching out to your uncompensated but loyal social network – especially people who may be deemed your so-called influencers – can be taken as a sign that not only is your company’s service now suspect BUT SO IS your company’s ethos, respect and appreciation of your loyal users
So there’s a multiplier effect. First there’s the technical issue. We ALL understand that technology is failable, so when there’s a system glitch we look for the next signs of your company’s technical competency. Does your company plan for (inevitable> system failures? In other words “how long does it take to get back online?” As the clock ticks we begin to doubt your technical competency SO AS THE CLOCK TICKS it becomes increasingly important to manage the message of the failure. You send out a message explaining “this is an extraordinary failure”, i.e., “the server crashed and then a dump truck crashed into the building hosting our back-up server . . which caused a nearby backhoe operator to look away just as she was digging around the fiber cable that connects our tertiary server back-up system to the internet backbone . . . ”
The Web is a place of viral effects. When your company provides a mission critical service – like domain registration, DNS controls, domain transfer controls, etc. – AND things are not going right, the thing to do is NOT to treat your loyal user base like they are mushroons. A company needs to get that, in a real time news world no message IS A message. Just maybe not the one you want to send.
Oversee.net, the owner of Moniker.com, has already seen its reputation sullied. Oversee purchased and ran SnapNames during a time when an insider was allowed, for ~2 years, to bid against others using their auction system. Prior to the SnapNames acquisition Oversee.net monetized an endless stream of trademark infringing domains for years. I know. I used to watch the lists of domains pointed to their system/servers. Their explanation for their conduct: “it’s hard for us to read the lists and cull the bad domains”. That from a technology company that stated that it could automatically optimize domains by “understanding” the domain’s meaning/intend, i.e. its words.
The one piece of the Oversee empire that was not tarnished by doubt was Moniker, largely due to the efforts of Monte Cahn before he sold his company, Moniker.com, to Oversee.
A good Web reputation and corresponding business trust can take years to develop. In the era of the Web, a good reputation can be sullied and then stomped into the ground in short order.
Web Reputation 101: Take your reputation seriously. Communicate. Get out ahead of the bad vibe spreading. Do the right thing, right away.
And don’t, EVER, slide into the thinking that it is better to ask forgiveness than to . . . do the right thing in the first place.
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