I was just trying to use our marketing software to send a message to our beta users and found that the website was down. No idea what is going on. Because the website is down I can’t even look at the company’s blog to see what is happening. So I went to search.twitter.com and immediately saw that other people experienced the same problem. But nobody from the company was there to let us know what was happening…

Lesson learned: when your server goes down, your team should post a brief explanation in various places to let people know what is happening. Twitter is a good place for spreading your ad hoc news, particularly when you website is down. Very fast. Very easy. Potentially big impact. Good stuff.

UPDATE

The company I was referring to is Vertical Response. As soon as they woke up in California, they started keeping people up to date on Twitter. See a screen shot of their messages below. Well done guys!

UPDATE 2

And when you are doing it really well, then you replace your homepage with something like this and simply redirect people to Twitter for more updates. Loving it:

Share this article Follow this blog