Thursday, February 24, 2011

Death by Facebook

In the world of Social Media Facebook is by far, and without a doubt, the most powerful player at the present time as far as Social Media goes. A single post on Facebook, shared with your friends, can be before thousands of people within a matter of minutes.

Such is the case of what happened recently with Jeff Dukatt, owner of Dukatt '71 in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. Jeff Dukatt recently contracted with Obsidian Moon Creations to give the website for his business a complete overhaul. The same day I received the signed contract, deposit, and CDs with images in the mail, Jeff called to let me know "I'm not dead!".

The story behind the statement "I'm not dead" is quite the ordeal, and shows the power of Social Media, but also how something, whether true or false, can go viral.

"As you may or may not know I, Jeffery Dukatt, am not dead!" That is the line that starts out an article in both the Sierra County Sentinel and The Herald newspapers. What transpired is that a known man on a Thursday morning told someone at a local grocery store that Jeff Dukatt had had a heart attack and died.

The same day, this individual told someone at another store the same thing. The man at the second store called his girlfriend and passed the rumor on to her. She, in turn, "posted the information on Facebook, which was seen by several of her friends", including a reporter who passed the information along. From there, the information went viral.

Jeff was out of town at the time, and was out of cell phone range (which is common place). When Jeff once again had cell phone coverage, he had over 40 calls on his voicemail, many of which were hang-ups, but one call was from the Truth or Consequences Police. Upon checking with the police, they were doing a "welfare check" due to numerous calls they had received that Jeff Dukatt had suffered a heart attack and had died.

From customer, friends, a priest, local police, state police, and even border patrol agents, so many had heard that Jeff Dukatt had died of a heart attack. To think that this all started with one man telling someone, who called his girlfriend, who posted the information on Facebook shows the power behind Social Networking.

We've all heard the stories about the teen that committed suicide. Something like this makes one wonder if a rumor may have been started about that teen, it was posted on Facebook, which totally destroyed the teen, which resulted in his committing suicide. A simple Google search supports this theory. USA Today has a story about a teenage girl that committed suicide after nine teens bullied her on Facebook. Another in The New York Times reports another teen suicide due to activity on Facebook. Reuters has an article titled "Teen suicide put spotlight on high-tech bullying".

We live in a high-tech, digital age where information is quickly at hand, and information can be spread around the globe within minutes. What we need to do is not simply pass information along simply because someone sends it to us, and asks us to forward it. The responsible thing to do would be to actually CHECK OUT THE FACTS. Did this recent "Death by Facebook" destroy Jeff Dukatt? Not at all, but it did make is life quite a bit more interesting over the following few weeks with people from around the country calling his cell phone and store to see if the rumor, spread over Facebook, was true or false. In the end, the girl who posted the initial blurb on Facebook, recinded the statement and apologized, but by then the "damage" had already been done.

When reading something, or posting/forwarding information, be sure to check the validity of what you are posting. And don't just check with the person that sent it to you, but contact the person it's about. Rumors and gossip need to stop.

Friday, February 4, 2011

Aren't all hosting providers the same? -- Pt 6

So, after our various problems that we had with different web hosting providers, we made the decision to invest in our own hardware, and offer hosting services ourselves.

Over the past year we've upgraded our server three times keeping up with the increased demand from your clients. Our current server platform has an Intel Xeon Quad Core 2.4GHz Processor, 4 GB RAM, 8MB Level 3 Cache, and much more. As the need arises, we are ready and willing to continue to upgrade our hardware.

We monitor the activity on the server at regular intervals, to ensure that the server is running optimally for ALL clients, including the monitoring of email blacklists and email reputation scores. We also have installed on our server, at NO ADDITIONAL COST a firewall, anti-virus, and anti-malware detection software. These are features not found on servers provided my most web hosting companies, or if they do offer these features they charge you additional fees.

Not at Obsidian Moon Creations. We offer fast, reliable, high quality, secured web hosting for LESS THAN $4.00 per month. All of our hosting packages include cPanel, one of the most popular web hosting control panels in the industry today. With our system, there is no waiting for 30 minutes to several days to have a database or FTP account created, such as is true on some other big hosting companies. Your requests are processed IMMEDIATELY, so you aren't wasting time waiting for the changes.

Further, where many hosting companies SAY they offer a 99.9% uptime guarantee, they choose not to actually show you the uptime. That isn't the case with Obsidian Moon Creations. We proudly show our uptime right on our homepage, monitored by a 3rd party monitoring service.

For your hosting needs, why not look at Obsidian Moon Creations for that fast, reliable, affordable hosting that you, and your clients, deserve.