Recently the popular web hosting company 1and1 had a major outage that apparently upset alot of folks that use twitter. We use 1and1, and to be fair, they generally do a good job with keeping their servers. At least that has been our experience. But just out of curiosity, I thought I’d do a quick Twitter search to see what people were saying about the outage.
It’s Cool, Just Let Us Know What’s Up
The general sentiment was that most customers were ok with outages and expect some here and there, they simply wanted to know what the problem was and when the issue would be resolved. While it’s true 1and1 has a system status page, it was down as well! Phone calls resulted in nothing but a busy signal. So where did people turn to? The 1and1 twitter page. Here is a screenshot of 1and1′s Twitter page. No updates.
Here are a few twitter rants by unhappy 1and1 customers:
What conclusions can we draw from this?
- Customers are going to use social media to express their thoughts and opinions
- Social media sites like Twitter have became so mainstream, that customers are starting to expect engagement through them.
- If you want to keep your customers in the loop, and happy during the good and bad times, you should really consider engaging with them through social media. They are there, shouldn’t you be?
