Yesterday featured an attack on Twitter which resulted in the service being down for most of the day. The result was wide spread anxiety among the hordes to whom Twitter is as addictive as nicotine or caffeine. I found myself in a state of schadenfreude at how people were lamenting the loss of a service that had not existed five years ago.
This outage proves the point that any technology can be a tremendous value to marketing and PR people in the execution of their jobs. However, the job goes on regardless of what is running or not. You do not delay a product launch simply because Twitter or Facebook are not running at 100 percent. They exist to compliment your marketing service, they are not there to replace it.
My first recommendation to all those who were taken aback by the Twitter outage is take a deep breath. First of all, if you stop and think about it, what is not being said by you on Tweeter? I have seen very few messages that were so Earth shattering that they needed to be sent out immediately, despite what senior executives seemed to think at the moment.
No the Tweeter outage yesterday showed us three things that are good learning lessons for marketing and PR pros. The first one is the most obvious, always have a back up plan. You may decide to send out that press release the day of the next great black out, or you may decide to have your event on the day of the big blizzard. It is essential that there always be a plan B. A lot of managers don't like to have a plan B because they believe that is planning for failure but by not having one, you are in fact planning to fail.
It also proved that new technologies, while helpful and, at times, exciting, are subject to risk. All technology is but the newer ones by virtue of their youth still have bugs to be worked out and are also the target of those wrong doers who seeing them much in the same way that a hungry lion seeks out the youngest prey in the herd.
Lastly, there is an old lesson we need to remember and that is while technology does make our lives easier, it is not irreplaceable. Remember that computers used to be the size of a room and typewriters used to require people who can spell and even on the web we just had basic web sites. So while losing a service can be a headache, it is just that. Having your car in the shop is a bigger one. So keep that in perspective.
Technology is great, but it's loss while a pain is not the end of the world!
RIP-John Hughes
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