Things not to do in a PR crisis…No.1

January 31st, 2007 by Lloyd Gofton

It appears GoDaddy, the US Hosting and Domain provider has kicked off a chain of events that will shortly be gracing the case study examples of PR presentations around the world. 

Allow me to elaborate on this fictitious scenario:

Slide 5: How not to respond in a crisis…

If your company withdraws its services, in this instance a domain registration, even with arguably honourable intentions,* do not be tempted to respond to resulting criticism like this:

“GoDaddy reserves the right to terminate your access to the services at any time, without notice, for any reason whatsoever.” GoDaddy General Counsel Christine Jones.

Crikey, I really hope the PR team had nothing to do with that statement, maybe the resulting debate will bring that point home.

As Shel Holtz points out: Is anybody counseling this organisation on the PR ramifications of this position? “Register your domain with GoDaddy. You’ll never know why or when we might shut it down.”

* GoDaddy suspended a domain name based on the content of the site. The suspension resulted from the discovery that SecLists.org was publishing MySpace user names and passwords on its site. However, it appears the list of user names and passwords had already been published in a variety of places. Webpronews.com overviews the full story.

                              

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