Business Advice for Twitter Given and Taken
Though not on the same scale (or with as much anger) as Jeff Jarvis’ advice on customer service for Dell, there was a blip of discussion yesterday about social network cum instant message broadcasting service Twitter, and its reliability.
Long-time tech marketing-communications-strategy adviser Shel Israel posted an open letter to Biz Stone, Evan Williams and the other Twitterites.
The advice: come clean about recent slowdowns and outages; lay out the business plan, including where revenue is going to come from; publish a blog to get your message out better; and rebuild the service from scratch on a different technology platform.
Solving one of those issues is half-done. The Twitter Blog has been going for some time, but the fact there isn’t an easy-to-find link to it on the Twitter interface is something that should be resolved. Including the most recent blog headline on some or all of the Twitter interfaces would go a long way toward improving communications with devoted users, who openly speculate about what’s going on in the absence of regular news.
Biz Stone responded to Shel’s comments, promising to provide some more detailed stats and explaining that the team is much more focused on getting a stable service than they are about long-term revenue.
This reminds me a lot of the early days of Flickr, when the Vancouver start-up was struggling to meet increasing demands on its servers. The solution for Flickr was to sell to Yahoo, and move operations onto shiny new banks of servers at Yahoo Central. Twitter isn’t showing any signs of pursuing a buyer, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be a sale some time.
My Twitter profile. My other posts that mention Twitter.
Technorati Tags: twitter, micro-blogging, shel israel, biz stone, evan williams, startups, social networks, communication, business, transparency, advice
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POSTED IN: Audiences, Communication Tactics, Customers, Issues Management, PR Tools, Reputation Management, Social Media
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