Beware of the digital mob

Since I’m on the computer all day at work and monitor my company’s Twitter account, I’m watching Twitter all day, my own personal account included. So when I discovered my web sites were down I tweeted about it. In reply I was told that my hosting service, 1&1, had a major outage. Curious, I started a Twitter search feed to see what people were saying about the outage. And people were pissed.

The entire episode only lasted for maybe 15 minutes. This isn’t the first time my web sites have gone down. It’s not a regular occurrence by any stretch, but when it happens I just usually think, “well that sucks,” and then just wait it out…because after 15 minutes the problem seems to solve itself. Keep in mind I’m not hosting any “important” web sites. They are all personal so the worst that happens is someone doesn’t get to see my Miss South Carolina map. Boo hoo.

But as I was watching people tweet about the outage I started thinking more about my stuff. My e-mail is domain-based so I started worrying about my e-mail. I pretty much watched as people started looking for pitchforks and torches. The best part was when competing hosting services jumped in with special offers like, “is your hosting down? Jump over to us right now and get $100 off!”

Honestly, that’s smart marketing. If you can take advantage of someone’s business misfortune to make your business look good, do it. I can safely say switching hosts never really entered my head (talk about a hassle), but I’d be lying if I didn’t say being part of the digital mob forming had me tweeting frequently about the situation, getting in mini-chats with other twitterers and so on.

Then after 15 minutes it was all fixed. The sites were up and la dee da. I don’t know why the hosting went down…and I don’t really care, it’s back and I’m happy and I’m still not paying a lot for hosting. The minimal price is actually what makes bitching about a 10 minute outage seem petty. Ten minutes is pretty good turn around on a huge tech problem in my book. Of course, I come from a world where trying to get a banner ad from displaying on a web site takes four days to get addressed and even then, not fixed.

After all the drama it got me thinking about group thought, but digital group thought. Had I not tweeted about the outage, or more so, had I not looked to see what others were saying, I wouldn’t have gotten near-angry. I would have waited 20 minutes, checked again and found everything was back to normal. Only because I saw a mob on the street and thought, “I wonder what they’re doing,” did I get involved in a vocal capacity.

It’s dangerous. It’s amazing how the immediate opinions of others can whisk you out of your normal thought without you even realizing it, and it’s even easier on the internet. But that’s the curse for those of us who have a comment for everything. We can’t shut up. And when someone says something to us we have to respond, plain and simple. Yes, I know it’s annoying but that’s the way it goes. And chances are if you’re on Twitter and use it regularly you’re one of those people too. So nyah.

In the end the bigger problem in all of this was not that there was an outage, but that 1and1 didn’t communicate anything during the outage. They apparently have a Twitter account but fail to use it to keep customers informed, let alone for marketing purposes. Could they have sent out some sort of notice? Sure. Am I mad that they didn’t? No. It was a 10 minute outage. I don’t really need to know that someone accidentally unplugged a network cable. Had it been hours or days, then yes, I would have been miffed and demanded some sort of explanation.

Alas, there is one more subplot in this soap opera and that’s the role of now ubiquitous instant communication. With the Twitters and Facebooks and other social hideouts, communication is instant all the time and people are getting used to that. When news breaks, Twitter lights up because people are talking about it, following it, and getting their gossip from The People. So naturally we expect businesses to be in the mix as well. Some are doing it, I’ve seen it, but many are not. Making good use of tools like Twitter isn’t sending out special offers and links to articles, it’s the connection with customers.

But that requires a lot of effort. It means a person or team has to be watching the digital taverns all the time and the second anyone says something like, “my service is crappy,” you have jump in and say, “how can I help you?” It sounds easy - and it is easy to execute - but complicated to setup a infrastructure to support that ease.

If businesses don’t start kicking their social interaction into overdrive, soon the Twitterverse will be nothing but angry mobs. And that’s not good for anybody.