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How to handle online people who wants to make your life miserable
Written By Causalien on Jun. 20, 2008.
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I know that blogging will create these type of confrontation eventually, but actually going through the ordeal sucks.
To put things in perspective, I wrote a bad review on a prestigious restaurant here. And a furious long time customer of the restaurant decided to contact my current employer about the review. Long story short, the whole Marketing department is then made aware of this and I had to spend approximately half a day with them to clear things up. It is a personal site and does not express the opinion of my employer, yet the person persisted with contacting them directly. Needless to say, I am just caught in the middle wondering "WTF" (A bit of a history. I negligently forgot to erase one our company logo from one of the pictures because I was focusing on making the food look good)
It has been dealt with and I hope the person doesn't raise any other waves, but it made me wonder. How do other bloggers deal with this?
Tyme
Written Jun. 21, 2008 / Report /
I'm sorry you had to go through. It happens often in the gaming industry if a person is employed by a gaming site yet writes a personal review on their own site. If the reviewer is well known the game that received a bad review will call the gaming site to complain about their "rogue" employee. Not an appropriate action IMO, more like a knee-jerk damage control reaction. So you aren't alone. :)
Passing on how others I know dealt with these situations:
1) Keep your work circumstances completely off the blog but that also means social networks as well. Keeping them separate helps limit the odds of someone calling your employer.
2) Have a discussion with your employer so, in the event this happens again, the call is directed to you immediately as this is not a work related issue. You do not know when this is going to happen or even if it will happen again but if it does you can handle it directly.
3) Have a contact phone number for people to contact you. That will help deter people from looking for other methods of contract. Phone numbers are pretty cheap, at least in the US, thanks to services like Skype (VoIP)/Vonage or GrandCentral that will forward calls to any number you like. There might be similar services in your area if these do not work for you.
That's all I can think of off the top of my head based on what others have been through. I hope it doesn't happen to you again.
Scrivs
Written Jun. 23, 2008 / Report /
I read this last week and I didnt' know how to respond. After the weekend has passed I still don't know how to respond. I would do very bad things to someone that bothered me like this. Or I would just ignore them, but it's hard to say to simply do that when they are interfering with your work.
Causalien
Written Jun. 23, 2008 / Report /
Thank you Tyme for the advices. Much appreciated.
Scrivs, my lifestyle leads me to ignore these most of the time until there are actions to be taken like them contacting my work. It seems like I will not be let off the hook that easily though.
Today I just tracked a suspicious traffic spike to a law firm in Ontario who got referred to my site by email. I feel some roller coaster ride coming up.
Tyme
Written Jun. 23, 2008 / Report /
You're welcome. :) I hope it all works out....and that nothing comes of the traffic you noticed.