To Close The Blacknight Matter

November 17, 2009 at 11:29 am

I posted on Friday about my disappointment that Blacknight doesn’t properly use the tools available to it in times of crisis. While many people commented on the blog, seemingly Michele Neylon (MD of Blacknight) wasn’t able to. He claimed to have posted his comment twice and insinuated on Twitter that I was receiving these comments and choosing not to publish.

That is not true.

It’s also irritating that someone who was clearly having technical difficulties at his end chose to publicly insinuate an untruth about me on Twitter (a very public space) – about something that was factually incorrect.

On Friday I emailed Michele and asked him to email me directly and I would publish his comments. I heard nothing back. I emailed him again yesterday because I believe in open discussion and sincerely wanted to publish his comments as they would add to the discussion. He came back to me late yesterday and I’m happy to publish what he has to say below:

Most of what I would have said has been said by other people in the comments. In common with a lot of companies in our sector we maintain two separate blogs:

http://blog.blacknight.com – news, offers, marketing etc.,
http://www.blacknightstatus.com – technical service notifications both from us and from companies that impact on our services eg. domain registries or bandwidth carriers

We have not posted technical information to our main company blog in well over a year. All our technical support staff would direct clients to the status site and it’s also linked to from all pages on our main site and in all outgoing emails from the support desk

The status site is 100% independent from the main Blacknight network etc., and doesn’t even use our DNS servers. Basically as long as we can get online in some way we can get onto it to post updates to our clients.

All updates posted to the status site appear on Twitter as well. See: http://twitter.com/blacknight/status/5709231280 for but one example. You posted a screenshot of our Twitter account to your blog. If you’d gone further down (back) you’d have seen several posts in relation to the issue on morgana from Thursday afternoon.

So there you have it. The word from Blacknight.

I’m doing a lot of reading around how people engage online. The academics would tell us that people tend to engage more quickly and more deeply due to the levels of anonymity; that they feel they can hide behind the anonymity in order to express themselves in ways that they wouldn’t do face to face. I think Twitter is an interesting phenomenon (for many reasons) but mostly because I’m noticing a variety of people who act like it’s anonymous when clearly it’s not. I wonder if Michele would have published his derogatory remarks about me on another online forum – I think not? Obviously Blacknight keep their blog to the superficial PR/marketing level. They wouldn’t blacken it with a personal attack that is unfounded and not proven. But yet he feels that it’s OK to do this on Twitter? Same size audience, same damage done.

What ever happened to the telephone? If I was heading up a company that was in crisis management mode, and a client (ie. me) published a blog about their poor handling of the situation, I would do everything in my power to get my opinion across; to attempt to rectify the situation and to clarify things. If I was unable to publish a comment and the client expressed concern at not receiving my comments, I’d pick up the phone. Or I’d email. Or do something to make myself heard. I wouldn’t go ahead and publish a derogatory remark to an audience of the client’s peers and colleagues.

Maybe that’s just me and how I do business?

Posted in Best Practice, Twitter | 3 Comments