Using twitter as an outage notification

Sun Jul 5 04:29:22 UTC 2009

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Frank Bulk"
Sent: Saturday, July 04, 2009 10:59 AM
Subject: RE: Using twitter as an outage notification

> When the local power companies uses twitter, then maybe I'll consider using
> twitter for our customers.
>
> There's the temptation by some of companies to leverage the latest
> technology to appear "cool" and "in tune" with customers, but by far and
> large, when something goes down customers either do no nothing, wait, or
> call in.  I think the best use of everyone's time is to make sure their call
> center/support desk has the capability to post an announcement to those that
> call in.  And then make sure something gets posted to the website.  SMS,
> Facebook, and Twitter fall in line after all that.
>
> Frank

I thought this was interesting:

"Bonnie Smalley has Internet bragging rights: She has been blocked by Twitter for hand-typing too many tweets in an hour. 
They thought she was a computer program made to spew spam.
Ms. Smalley, it turns out, is a 100 percent human customer service representative for Comcast. She is one of 10 
representatives who reach out to customers through social networks, rather than waiting for them to find Comcast's support 
site."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/02/technology/personaltech/02basics.html?partner=rss&emc=rss 