Being held hostage by a contractor or service provider?
It never fails that when we start working with a new client, we discover some area where 
an old contractor or outside firm is holding their intellectual property hostage.
It may be a social media account or website hosting. It could be access to a CRM or your email marketing platform.
The point is that you can NEVER be too careful when it comes to ensuring that you have long-term access and control of your various accounts.
Not long ago, we started working with a client who asked us to take over the management of his Facebook Fan page. It hadn’t been used in a while and they were ready to start posting more updates on behalf of the firm.
When we asked this attorney to make us an authorized “admin” of the page, it turned out he couldn’t. Lo and behold, a former employee had set up the page under THEIR personal name. That meant the attorney could no longer access the page and we were forced to start from scratch setting up new accounts and building up their fan base.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg.
I can’t TELL you how many times we started working with clients only to discover that they did not own the hard coding or hosting of their website! Rather, the contractor or web company who set it up retained this control and if the attorney wanted to make any changes or use a different provider, they would lose their entire site!
In fact, this recently happened to a very good friend of ours (and a very brilliant attorney) who had to redesign her site from scratch after paying $10,000 for a beautiful site that she did not own and no longer had access to once she terminated her relationship with the designing company.
I shared the following tips with her in order to avoid this nightmare in the future, and I encourage you to use them as well to protect your intellectual property or online real estate.
1. Any accounts set up in YOUR name and on your behalf must be done using a central email address that YOU OWN. When we start working with clients, we set up a basic gmail account that the attorney has access to at any time. We use this gmail address when we make purchases, submit press releases, submit event listings, open new accounts, etc. That way, the client has access to everything in one central location should we decide to part ways in the future.
2. Do not sign a contract for a website or hosting services unless you retain total control! I don’t care how pretty it looks or how fancy it seems; unless you own that html code, do NOT sign on the dotted line! Same goes for sites you “rent” too. It’s not the brightest idea to pay $2500-$5000 a month for a website that you CERTAINLY won’t have access too if you want to break up with the service provider down the road. For what you pay in one month’s “rent”, you could OWN a site with all the bells and whistles they are offering you.
3. Ensure social media accounts are set up using either your PERSONAL login or a central account like I mentioned in step 1. This goes for Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Google+, YouTube and even a hootsuite account—which is used to manage these profiles all in one place.
4. Retain ownership of your phone number! This may sound like a “duh” tip, but we recently had a client who learned this the hard way. When she decided to stop renting her office space, she learned that her phone number (which goes to the main switchboard of the building) would not be coming with her, nor would the receptionist be forwarding the calls. I’m sure you could imagine what a nightmare this turned out to be.
A few proactive steps like these can save you from a TON of headaches and hassles when working with outside companies and independent contractors.
If you’ve ever found yourself held hostage, I’d love to hear your experience and what you did about it. Please feel free to leave a comment below.
Would you like to talk about how we can help you save time on your marketing and help you turn ideas into action? Simply schedule a time on my calendar for a no-strings virtual cup of coffee.
