Eight months ago I was notified that my domain registration provider would be cancelling its service, and that I would need to find a new provider before the site shutdown. I was assured by both my old and new domain provider that the transition would be seamless and hassle-free (famous last words). Knowing very well that this would not be the case, I strategically decided to make the migration between providers over the course of a weekend in order to mitigate as much business interruption as possible. As hours turned to days, and as sure as the Sun rose that following Monday, I found my business in a purgatory of ‘darkness’ – unable to access both my website and e-mail. Not surprised by this outcome, I told my brother-in-law about my dilemma, who simply laughed and said “no one goes ‘dark’ any more, that’s so 1999.” He was right (what every brother-in-law wants to hear)!
For professional reasons, it is the policy of my law firm not to disclose my personal e-mail to clients or business vendors – commingling personal and business e-mail is not a good idea for lawyers. I decided to come up with a solution that was ‘outside the box,’ and would allow me to stay connected to my clients. For ethical and professional reasons, I highly discouraged “Friending” people on Facebook if you are in the professional services industry. Some may disagree with this reasoning, but when it is YOU that your clientele is buying, is it a good idea to have a high school “best” friend whom you haven’t seen in 20 years post a picture of you doing “things” that fall under “youthful indiscretion”? Maybe? Maybe not?
Thus, I decided to go to the professional social networking site, LinkedIn, and inform my contacts that I was having e-mail and website issues. My clientele know how to get a hold of me, but my colleagues usually connect with me via e-mail or social networking. I asked for everyone to be patient during this transition period, and that I would keep them updated as soon as the domain was back up. To my surprise, I received several phone calls from people informing me first that (a) my website was down; and (b) when Googling my name, LinkedIn came up first, and they saw my note about my domain migration.
This was a pleasant and unexpected response, but I guess I should have known better. It has been said how extremely easy it is stay connected today, but in a business environment, one must be strategic in how they go about doing this. Twitter, Facebook, WordPress, LinkedIn, etc., have many useful tools – the one I found beneficial, keeping my business up and running even when it went dark.