So what do you do with a passing listing or comment about your company in the public domain? Good or Bad? In my opinion, leave well enough alone.

This past weekend, while I had all of five minutes between the kid’s activities, I picked up this month’s issue of a well known business magazine. The article discussed the varying levels of hosting. It covered shared, dedicated, managed and even the cloud and grid concepts. The author even had a listing of providers in each space. Surprising to me, FastServers was listed as a “name provider” in the managed section. I showed the article to my wife, who took a few minutes to review parts of the article (I think it was her attempt to glean some insight as to what I do all day). She then said “Well, that’s nice, but what do you do with it?"

It's very easy to write a blog and put a link to that publication. (Sorry, i'm not that shameful, at least this week). That would be a way to capitalize on the listing. I could title it “JOE’S MAGAZINE Recommends FastServers for Managed Servers!” Sure would look nice, but it wouldn’t exactly be true. I could also just put the link in this blog and state that we were listed. That wouldn’t be bad either. Then again, the other companies we play with in the space were listed as well, so i’d be calling just as much attention to them. Overall, it would be missing the point. The best thing is to leave it alone. Especially if it’s a negative comment.

We’ve been in business a long time. We have some people who love us to death. Others, well..they might not wish us well. It’s the nature of doing business. When you have thousands of customers, its impossible for everyone to be happy. There are some people who will call or email us and express their displeasure. There are some who will signify their displeasure with their wallet…they’ll just go somewhere else. And there are those who will go into the public domain and let their voices be heard. In all cases, as much as you want/try to help, you may not prevent any of those situations from happening.

For those familiar with this industry, there are publications and forums dedicated to discussions on every aspect of hosting. And if you do read them, you see people who will profess their displeasure with a host (just as much as others promote a host they love). So what if the opposite happened..we get listed as one of the worst providers? Leave it alone.

Years back, would I engage people who I felt that “flamed” us on a board, or in an email? I might. Did it help? On the very rarest occasion, yes. Partly because I got my aggressions of the day out of my system. Partly because I felt good about standing up for my hosting family. But did it help my company? More often than not, it didn’t help at all. There were the times that literally threw kerosene on the fire (nothing like have someone call your CEO and add you to their list of issues). There are times that I’d try to help, but unfortunately the situation is too far gone for any multitude of reasons. And is it really beneficial to scold a customer who rants about how lousy you treat them, even if they didn’t pay their bill? Or stretches the truth about the situation that occurred? Not one bit.

In the end, what’s best is to work with every client, every day and treat them like you’d like to be treated when you buy something. Give them value for the price and support the product. And if you do that, things have a tendency to take care of themselves. And who knows, maybe those nice passing mentions will keep coming.

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