So this morning, Twitter went down (it still is at the time of writing). Run for the hills. Burn the witches. Grab the nuclear fallout bag. Or not, maybe go and make a cuppa instead. But for some, it could be an issue.
It had me thinking.
I’ve been working supplier side to my industry for a number of years. In any company I’ve worked with, we have worked our backsides off to ensure as close to 100% uptime of clients sites / forms / designs / whatevers as possible. At huge cost to the company and typically only a fraction passed on to the end client. We always strive to guarantee those up times but sometimes, things just happen. Especially with technology. There can be all sorts of problems that hit technology and a lot of it is not known, sudden and then takes a team of caffeine empowered developers to fix the issue. There is no known time limit. Sometimes it’s over so quickly you’ve blinked and you missed it. Sometimes not. It’s an unknown.
But what is known, is that as soon as it happens, suppliers will start to get phone calls asking what is going on quickly followed by “I want recompense” of some description.
I get that. You’re paying for a service that you want to be live 100% of the time. Even though 99.9% is very very good, that one minute of outage “made my world crumble inside”. And when you get hold of say your client manager, you know yo uhave a friendly voice on the other end of the line looking into the issue for you.
But what about social media channels like Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin? You don’t pay for those services directly even though you may have social media management tools like Hootsuite or adverts going into those channels, but you aren’t paying directly to them. You may have invested a HUGE amount of time on social media campaigns. You possibly even have a social media team member, or team if you’re a rather large company.
You may have been planning to launch the best new campaign EVER this morning, but, you couldn’t.
You may have invested a SERIOUS amount of money in social media.
But how do you find out what’s going on? Without Twitter, I couldn’t even search twitter to see what was wrong. I turned to my friend Google. He always is in the know and quickly told me in 2.33 seconds that Twitter is having some issues. So, who do you call? And how do you get your money back?
Well I couldn’t call anyone. And well…I don’t think they care about my money. So the lesson learned from this?
Sometimes sh!t happens. But you can guarantee that there are multitude amount of people working behind the scenese to get things fixed as quickly as they can. Maybe just ask them if they want a coffee / tea / juice / frappamachalacha to help them through the pain. If you can find a number to reach them on that is. 😉