GoDaddy.com Makes Lemonade

When life hands you lemons – make lemonade.  That’s exactly what GoDaddy.com did this morning in response to a server outage that caused millions of websites to be temporarily unavailable on Monday.  Your own website may have been one them:  GoDaddy.com hosts more than 5 million websites and manages DNS routing for millions more, mostly for small businesses.  The outage even affected their own site.

There was a lot of speculation on major news outlets about whether it was an individual or the hacker group Anonymous that had hacked GoDaddy.  As it turns out, it was neither.  Still, the public relations damage was done and all that attention was profoundly bad press for GoDaddy.  These are a few things that GoDaddy did well in response to the event and the attention surrounding it:

·         They did a good job of communicating with customers via Twitter in real-time.

·         They began combating false rumors about being hacked as soon as they realized the real source of the problem.

·         They fixed the server problem within a few hours.

·         Today, they issued the following correspondence to their customers in which they accept fault, apologize, and offer what must be a very costly olive branch.

 While most of our own business disasters may not be as high profile as GoDaddy’s, we can learn from their experience.  Sure, they may lose a few customers, but not nearly as many as they would if they didn’t have a solid public relations plan to addresses issues like these.