Blog That Doesn’t Bother To Update In Times of Emergency
November 13, 2009 at 12:20 pm
Blacknight regularly wins awards for its blog and its use of internet marketing. Today I received a desperate call from a client who is hosting with Blacknight – the Blacknight server Morgana was hacked yesterday. All the information is gone. And shock of all – the last time it was backed up was 27 August.
The client found out by someone notifying them their site was down. I visited the blacknight blog just now and there’s some ego-driven article about ‘me in Seoul’. While the MD is gallivanting around the world, the server has been hacked and no-one is telling customers about what’s going on.
In the meantime, I telephoned Blacknight, got through to someone on support who had no answers, got put through to supervisor (Jonathan) who also had no answers. He told me he didn’t want to disturb the engineers who were fixing the problem by asking them why it hadn’t been backed up since August. As the client facing supervisor, isn’t he supposed to have those kind of answers? The one bit of information in relation to backup that I did manage to extract from him is that all their other servers are backed up everyday. Woopy doo. But can he prove it?
When I asked him how they were notifying clients about this failure in service, he said they posted a notice up to Blacknight Status.com – a first for me, I’ve never heard of that site before, but seemingly I’m supposed to know all about it and I”m even supposed to have RSS feeds so I can keep myself updated as to what calamity has happened next.
Blacknight have failed to deal with this problem effectively in my opinion.
- A blog is not just for vanity stories, it is also an ideal vehicle for communicating when errors have been made.
- A simple email to all clients they know are affected would notify people what’s going on – and possibly even instil some confidence that the issue is being well handled.
- Blacknight are all over Twitter. But there is silence on the Twitterwaves about this.
Once again we see another Irish business who uses social media tools for promotion purposes only. File this one under the same category as The Big Switch who forgot all about their Twitter account when people were urgently contacting them when the laptops and data went missing.
