Using twitter as an outage notification

Sun Jul 5 20:50:22 UTC 2009

On Sun, Jul 5, 2009 at 7:15 AM, Roland Perry <lists at internetpolicyagency.com
> wrote:

> In article <4A50ACB7.6070901 at airwire.ie>, Martin List-Petersen <
> martin at airwire.ie> writes
>
>> Calling it a lame web 2.0 is pretty much off, when it's actually used
>> for something sensible.
>>
>
> I seem to be trying to find the middle ground between members of the public
> who think "The Internet isn't appropriate because they didn't teach it to me
> in college 20 years ago" and those who say "Web 2.0 isn't appropriate
> because they didn't teach it to me in college 5 years ago".
>
> Shouldn't we at least be giving it the benefit of the doubt?

Well, I'm no social media expert, and I don't spend a whole lot of time on
any of the social networking sites (I particularly dislike Facebook,
actually). (And yet, I'm probably about as qualified for the SME title as
90% of those who claim to be...)

However, I was a student fairly recently, and so maybe my perspective will
hold some value.

I really like the Posterous+Twitter+Facebook+etc. combo. To manage the Fb
side, you could probably tap a trusted student to make the School an Fb
page. A lot of the students will check there. Parents will probably check
the Posterous or Twitter pages. Some of the more tech-savvy students and
parents will sign up for Twitter and get SMS notifications.

And then, additionally, there are plenty of ways to grab that data and copy
it onto the school website as well (at least until it crumbles under the
load), and you could broadcast it over a mailing list to people's email
address.

The idea, I think, is to deliver your message to as much of your audience as
you can. By delivering your message over multiple mediums, you're making it
easy for your audience to hear the message, since they can do it in the way
that's most comfortable to them. And the redundancy doesn't hurt.