Happy Halloween! Tis the season for cackling witches, squeaking doors, and things that go bump in the night. While frightening occurrences are commonplace during this time of year, you don’t want to have scary things happen in your business life. Especially if it involves your online presence.
Your online brand is very important because it is the public’s first impression of you or your business. Of course there are going to be hiccups along the way, but there are a number of things you want to avoid like the plague. We’ve decided to put together a list of the three scariest things that can happen to your online presence.
Email Vanishes
Imagine life without email. For me, life would come to a stand still. Email is an integral part of communicating online with your friends, family and coworkers. There are many reasons that email can go down, including network issues with your service provider. At Robb Digital we use Google Apps for Work as our email provider. That and Microsoft Office 365 are great ways to keep your email up and running. This way our email is in the Cloud instead of downloaded to our individual devices. When working with large reputable companies like Google and Microsoft it is rare to have an outage.
Website Hacked
Envision this nightmare: you go to your website domain and there is something else there. It may feel as though you are in the middle of a slasher film, but in reality your website has been hacked. Unfortunately there are unscrupulous people out there that enjoy wreaking havoc on the web. There are a number of ways to avoid this, but completing regular backups is a must. We use GoDaddy’s Managed WordPress hosting because backups are included.
Attack of the Internet Trolls
No, we’re not talking about tiny people that live under a bridge. Instead we’re referring to internet trolls. According to Wikipedia, an internet troll is “a person who sows discord on the Internet by starting arguments or upsetting people, by posting inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community (such as a newsgroup, forum, chat room, or blog) with the deliberate intent of provoking readers into an emotional response.” Unfortunately trolls are prevalent online and can cause headaches for your brand and social media presence. The key is to monitor comments closely. Be careful not to engage trolls because it can backfire. The key is to have a commenting policy for your website that you can use for your social media profiles as well. This type of policy states what will and will not be tolerated in your online community.
Sure there are other scary things that can happen to your online presence. If you know of any, please let us know in the comment section below.
