ANHosting, my current hosting provider, has been a nightmare to work with. Not because they’re not nice people–the support staff I’ve worked with have been enormously helpful–but because ANHosting cannot seem to keep my site up and running. So I am leaving them for another hosting provider. Thanks for all the input–I got a lot from Twitter. In the end, because SocialSphere hosts several of our clients on them, I settled on Bluehost. Once I figure out the WordPress migration issues (and if anybody can point me to a nice “how-to”, I’d really appreciate it), I’ll throw the DNS switch and be done with it. In the meantime, I’ll blog a little more lightly here so I don’t get more “I wanted to comment but couldn’t” notes…

Thanks for your patience! And ANHosting, if you’re listening, I gave one of your support reps an ultimatum–have a manager call me or I’m gone–that you failed to meet.

So I sent an email. It wasn’t a particularly nice one. What I said to the PR rep who left it was “You’re gonna be in a whole WORLD of hurt if you keep this up with other bloggers!”

On Friday, I got a somewhat defensive email from the CEO of the offending company. I wrote back saying, in part, “It was perhaps harshly worded–but while I kept my response private, other bloggers will call you out, and I wanted to make sure that you avoided that.” I also offered up several social media consultants that could help get everyone up-to-speed on netiquette, and suggest he have a strong word with his PR and marketing people. This is the reply I got:

Thank you…I did clarify it with my PR department…the manager, which we just let go, was misinforming the team on proper netiquette.

You should see the difference in future posts.

Thanks again for the response.

Now sure, there could have been many other reasons why that manager was let go, but I’m pretty sure this didn’t help that person’s cause. She encouraged spamming, and she got fired.

Folks, you don’t drive without a license. Don’t participate in social media without understanding first what is appropriate and what is not.

Transparency and responsiveness are two hallmarks of social media and whatever current Web revision you claim to be operating in. Yet four of the most talked about companies in today’s tech sector practice very little of it. Is it time for the companies to change? Is it time for us to rethink the rules and standards that we like to apply to everyone? Or is it time for us to reevaluate our role models?

Read the entire article, and let me know if you agree!

Even the best and the brightest–and the most well intentioned–have fallen victim to concerns about email abuse. It’s a touchy subject. So when the makers of SocialMinder decided to include emailing 15 contacts as the requirement for upgrading to their full alpha service, they made what could very quickly end up becoming a fatal mistake.

Nathan Burke’s post on Blogstring explains how the upgrade email requirement works, and why people have been giving SocialMinder a hard time about it. What’s most important here is what SocialMinder does now. The only acknowledgement I’ve seen so far is on their uservoice pages:

They have a very limited amount of time to come out, engage their audience on our terms and turf, and regain some credibility. Until then, they will get more and more angry posts like this, and their likelihood of success is zero.

If you’re as old as I am, you’ll probably instantly remember this Faberge commercial (and I’ve been waiting for YEARS for the right moment to bring it up in a blog). This marketing model works: get the people you’re marketing to to market for you. But if the message changes from “hey this is a cool shampoo you should be using” to “hey, Faberge can’t really be trusted,” you’re in trouble!

Are you cutting off your audiences’ voices? If you don’t allow comments on your blog or news site, you are. The bigger question you might be asking is, why should I care?

Because your audience will find its voice, whether you want it or not, whether you facilitate it or not, whether you like what they have to say or not. So you can either empower them and help shape the conversation that arises, or ignore them, hoping they’ll just go away — which is precisely what they will do.

Case-in-point: I have been a fan of the Annals of Improbable Research since before they were even called that. I attend the Ig Nobel free talks as often as I can, and wrote about them frequently on my old website. Marc Abrahams is the editor of AIR.

I subscribe to the feed for Marc’s blog, in which, today, he called attention to a FOX News columnists’ usurpation of the term Ig Nobel in the title of a rant against 76 Obama-backing American Nobel laureates. Marc, who normally has a sense of humor, took Steven Milloy’s use of the term a little too personally, claiming that the “column discards the basic Ig Nobel notion of laughter and thought.”

I wanted to comment on this claim, but found nowhere to go. Marc’s AIR blog does not allow comments, nor—not surprisingly mind you—does the Fox web site which hosted the column. So I’ll post my thoughts here.

Mr. Abrahams, your blog post “discards the basic Ig Nobel notion of laughter and thought.” Do you feel like you need to pass the Kleenex test and defend your brand? Fine, do so, and tell us that’s the reason. But if you’re seriously offended at anything FOX News puts out, then you need to get out more often.

To both Mr. Abrahams and the webmasters over at FOXNews.com: Keep your audience on your site! Increase stickiness. Reduce churn. Do what both the New York Times and Reader’s Digest do and turn your comments on.

By now, well more than one third of American newspapers allow reader comments. You should too. Read this article by Mark Glaser if you’re not convinced—an article, by the way, which I can comment on.

Photo courtesy of Meredith Farmer and Flickr.