Using twitter as an outage notification

[sethm at rollernet.us (Seth Mattinen)]

Frank Bulk wrote:
> 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.
> 

A plain-text status website and recorded message before the phone tree 
scale quite well in the event of a major problem.

But yeah, Twitter will attract the "what's cool right now" demographic.

~Seth