I’m happy to announce that 1 hour and 44 minutes after posting that – I was unbanned.
How did it happen? I put it down to Social Media. Here’s the story:
- I had a number of people Tweet me 30 or so minutes before I posted my last post telling me that I was banned. I can only presume it happened around that times they all came at once.
- I reacted quickly by first emailing StumbleUpon using their contact form.
- I then posted my last post here at ProBlogger
- This post appeared moments later in my Twitter stream (this happens automatically)
- I plurked a link to the post.
- A few minutes later it was submitted to Digg (something I didn’t even consider doing)
- I received a heap of Twitter responses and the story was re-tweeted by quite a few of my followers
- I received a Direct Message tweet within moments fro a follower who gave me the email address of the community manager at StumbleUpon – I emailed him
- The post on Digg was at 90 Diggs within about half an hour
- Twitter was alive with the story (see this screen grab of Twitscoop which shows the tag cloud of what people were talking about on Twitter).
- Many readers emailed Stumbleupon
- I received an email and a comment on ProBlogger from the community manager at StumbleUpon an hour and a quarter after the post went live. He said that it could be resolved and that he’d like us to blog about the situation both here on ProBlogger and the SU blog. I emailed back that I would be happy to do so.
- ProBlogger was unbanned 1 hour and 44 minutes later.
- A few minutes later a story appeared on Digg about how I had been unbanned from StumbleUpon – linking to my Tweet about it.
- Now that I’m unbanned from SU the post saying that I’m banned is getting heaps of bookmarks…. ironically on StumbleUpon.
Here’s that Tag Cloud from Twitscoop
So what did I learn today?
- ProBlogger readers and Twitter followers are amazing. Between putting me in touch with the right person at SU and all your tweets, plurks and diggs you got this fixed really quick.
- StumbleUpon are responsive – or at least Walter their Community Manager is
- Social Media his powerful – while I knew this I don’t think I really had experienced it working so quickly on something that was personal to me
- When you’ve got a problem it can help to involve your friends, not completely lose it and blog a rant (while I was angry in my post I didn’t completely lose it – I tried to reach out to SU) and lastly – sometimes there is opportunity in when bad stuff happens. The buzz and traffic around this whole story has been quite amazing today. I think tomorrow I’ll get banned by Digg :-)
Thanks to everyone for your support, ideas, feedback and offers to help today. Thanks also to StumbleUpon for responding quickly. I look forward to hearing why all this happened and what we as bloggers can learn about it from your end. I’ll post more about this as Walter gets back to me.
The one thing that I do hope StumbleUpon will learn from and change is their ‘banned’ page. It has the potential to unfairly hurt reputations and tarnish sites that have not deserved that. I’m no lawyer but I suspect it could even border on some kind of defamation.
