Irish Blogosphere & Beyond Rallies Behind Mulley
The Irish blogging story of the last 24 hours has been Damien Mulley and Sky Handling Partners.
Readers of Irish KC will know Damien as, among many other things, the organiser of the Irish Blog Awards, and the author of the one Irish blog of all I singled out for attention on my Top 20 Online Ways To Stay Irish Away From Ireland
A couple of weeks ago Damien blogged his experiences of his baggage being lost and the very poor customer service he then received in trying to locate it from Sky Handling Partners. We’ve all lost baggage, and it’s not a whole lot of fun.
I’ve had some reasonably good customer service in repsonse to the loss, and some pretty bad service, but how Sky Handling Partners responded, or didn’t, to Damien as he reported it was way worse than anything I’ve experienced.
Eventually life goes on, but yesterday, and not for the first time, Damien noticed a visitor to his website who arrived there by way of searching on the term “sky handling partners”, and then shortly afterwards started receiving email confirmations from dating websites, including gay ones, all of which now were getting interesting profiles for Damien added to them. No, not by Damien.
One email had the IP of the submitter on it. All roads pointed to Sky Handling Partners, so Damien called more than once to report the abuse but was denied access to a manager.
At that point Damien asked what to do. And the Irish blogosphere responded.
On a site that gets very few comments per post, Damien’s post currently has 83 160 - and they’re not complimentary of Sky Handling Partners. Links to the story are everywhere and then it appeared on Digg. When I dugg it there was about 67 diggs; now there are 1,688 2,702 diggs, with another 117 comments over there. It made the front page of Digg, which usually means traffic in the tens of thousands, and indeed the traffic brought Damien’s site down, so his host moved it to a new machine to handle that traffic. And it made it onto TechMeme.
I don’t know if the police will end up involved, or legal proceedings will ensue, but right now about fifteen or so hours after the story broke there are hundreds of thousands of people who are far from impressed with Sky Handling Partners, whatever it is exactly they are responsible for.
Just in case you’re in any doubt, this is not a case of bullying by an online community, it’s support for a fellow blogger who has been seriously wronged.
Customer service is standard fodder for bloggers; we’ve all written posts detailing conversations that we think show up some strange behaviours. I’ve done it - albeit with affection - in this conversation with an Irish bank and this episode with an American bank.
But how Damien has been treated, by whoever, is shameful. If you have a Digg account, consider digging it HERE, or just leave a comment of support on damien’s post HERE. You never know, other companies that see such support just might improve their customer service as a result.
UPDATE: Legal letter requesting/demanding Damien take down blog posts on Sky Handling Partners sent. An idiotic reaction.
UPDATE II: This story broke on Wednesday evening in Ireland. On Thursday Damien’s site received 47,000 page views.
Eolaí gan Fhéile:
are you saying that a company with a traceable web address started harassing a customer with a legitimate complaint ONLINE???? doesn’t ANYONE know how the internet works? i hope this is actionable in the courts!
Well we don’t know for definite specifically who was doing the harassment (though my understanding of harassment is that it must be persistent) - the submitting of a customer to dating sites and creation of false profiles for that customer - but we do know that the company has refused to even handle queries regarding that abuse of the internet, with any decency.
I believe whoever is responsible, for example the company or an employee, it is definitely actionable under Irish law.
And no, an awful lot of people do not know how the internet works. I’ve see some laughable examples of that in Irish KC’s traffic.