Jen BeltzJen Beltz is Founder and Principal of Front Burner PR , a public relations and strategic marketing firm based in Portland. Follow Jen on Twitter: @FrontBurnerBuzz and on Facebook.
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Banished! Bitter Over Twitter
Nov 12, 2009 06:09 PM
Categories: Internet, Marketing, Technology, Tools Town: Portland
I am an addict. We are officially a nation addicted to Twitter, and Twitter, I am now convinced, is the crack of the social media world.
Even though my Twitter page (@FrontBurnerBuzz) is modest and small, I still use it nearly every day as an effective business tool, and also feed the Twitter pages of several clients’ accounts. I’ve had news stories picked up by press from some of my tweets, I’ve made a few great connections with folks, and I’d swear by Twitter as a valid tool for helping spread the word about your business or product.
The downside is what happens when your supply is cut off. How do I know this? Because when my comfortable little Twitter home was randomly invaded and closed up Monday morning, I instantly began having withdrawal symptoms.
While Twitter is a fantastic tool to have at your disposal, I learned that it is positively maddening when something goes wrong – and you have no recourse. In short, I was thrown into the Black Hole of the Twittersphere, and eventually informed by a very confusing e-mail that help might be coming my way “within 30 days.” (30 days?!)
The larger point is that I genuinely had not realized how useful I had found Twitter to be from a business perspective until it was no longer at my fingertips. During my banishment, I came across a surprising number of expletive-laden blog posts from people griping on forums about the similar experiences they were having. It’s like Twitter gets you addicted – then firmly yanks the rug out from beneath you.
During my 72-hour suspension from Twitter, I found myself sitting at my desk audibly laughing at…myself. I kept talking to my screen, trying to figure out how to “unsuspend” the account, with a cuss thrown in here and there for good measure.
My officemates became convinced I had an imaginary friend I was talking to at my desk. And while I fed pages for clients’ separate (and still-working) Twitter accounts, glumly pecking away at my daily tweets for their pages, well-meaning folks in our small office would pass by my door, alternately trying to comfort or distract me from my Twitter misery.
With no correction or solution on the horizon, I buzzed Rich Brooks (@therichbrooks) of Maine’s flyte new media to get his take on the issue. The first thing he said was, “If I woke up one day and my Twitter page had been suspended, I would curl up in a ball in the corner.” Not terribly promising, but definitely worth exploring.
The issue, according to Brooks, is that Twitter needs to pony up more resources if it’s going to be a consistently respected global tool. “If Twitter is rolling itself out as an enterprise-wide solution,” he noted, “then it can’t have its users waiting around for a month to learn whether or how their account was hacked, and then say, ‘maybe we’ll get back to you within 30 days.’”
Hear, hear!
There’s also a disturbing Twitter trend that seems to be going on, Brooks added: “It’s not what you know, or whether your account should even have been suspended in the first place, but who you know. The bigger, more visible tweeters out there just seem to be getting faster responses. You may be a small fry out there in the business world, but who’s to say your account shouldn’t be reinstated as quickly as anyone else’s?
“Hopefully it’s a temporary glitch,” he added, “but as things stand now, if something goes wrong and you’re not a giant player, you’re basically screwed. They don’t seem to have the manpower or resources to handle it. If Twitter wants to stop being treated as a toy and wants to be viewed as an industry-leading business tool, they really need to turn this around.”
After spending the better part of a week pleading with the Twitter fiefdom to restore my little account, assuring them I was not a con artist, a phisher, nor an “aggressive following or follower churner” (I had to look that one up), the account finally – and just as randomly – was restored. It wound up taking three days, and I don’t know how many hours and password combinations, to get the account back up and running – but now put an hourly dollar value on those hours, and you begin to get the picture.
In retrospect, I’m amazed that I became so unsettled by the loss of having a social media tool at my daily disposal that, back in the day, I had written off as a teenybopper flash in the pan focused on griping about braces and being grounded for the weekend. I need to tweet about that sometime.
Assuming I still have access.
Even though my Twitter page (@FrontBurnerBuzz) is modest and small, I still use it nearly every day as an effective business tool, and also feed the Twitter pages of several clients’ accounts. I’ve had news stories picked up by press from some of my tweets, I’ve made a few great connections with folks, and I’d swear by Twitter as a valid tool for helping spread the word about your business or product.
The downside is what happens when your supply is cut off. How do I know this? Because when my comfortable little Twitter home was randomly invaded and closed up Monday morning, I instantly began having withdrawal symptoms.
While Twitter is a fantastic tool to have at your disposal, I learned that it is positively maddening when something goes wrong – and you have no recourse. In short, I was thrown into the Black Hole of the Twittersphere, and eventually informed by a very confusing e-mail that help might be coming my way “within 30 days.” (30 days?!)
The larger point is that I genuinely had not realized how useful I had found Twitter to be from a business perspective until it was no longer at my fingertips. During my banishment, I came across a surprising number of expletive-laden blog posts from people griping on forums about the similar experiences they were having. It’s like Twitter gets you addicted – then firmly yanks the rug out from beneath you.
During my 72-hour suspension from Twitter, I found myself sitting at my desk audibly laughing at…myself. I kept talking to my screen, trying to figure out how to “unsuspend” the account, with a cuss thrown in here and there for good measure.
My officemates became convinced I had an imaginary friend I was talking to at my desk. And while I fed pages for clients’ separate (and still-working) Twitter accounts, glumly pecking away at my daily tweets for their pages, well-meaning folks in our small office would pass by my door, alternately trying to comfort or distract me from my Twitter misery.
With no correction or solution on the horizon, I buzzed Rich Brooks (@therichbrooks) of Maine’s flyte new media to get his take on the issue. The first thing he said was, “If I woke up one day and my Twitter page had been suspended, I would curl up in a ball in the corner.” Not terribly promising, but definitely worth exploring.
The issue, according to Brooks, is that Twitter needs to pony up more resources if it’s going to be a consistently respected global tool. “If Twitter is rolling itself out as an enterprise-wide solution,” he noted, “then it can’t have its users waiting around for a month to learn whether or how their account was hacked, and then say, ‘maybe we’ll get back to you within 30 days.’”
Hear, hear!
There’s also a disturbing Twitter trend that seems to be going on, Brooks added: “It’s not what you know, or whether your account should even have been suspended in the first place, but who you know. The bigger, more visible tweeters out there just seem to be getting faster responses. You may be a small fry out there in the business world, but who’s to say your account shouldn’t be reinstated as quickly as anyone else’s?
“Hopefully it’s a temporary glitch,” he added, “but as things stand now, if something goes wrong and you’re not a giant player, you’re basically screwed. They don’t seem to have the manpower or resources to handle it. If Twitter wants to stop being treated as a toy and wants to be viewed as an industry-leading business tool, they really need to turn this around.”
After spending the better part of a week pleading with the Twitter fiefdom to restore my little account, assuring them I was not a con artist, a phisher, nor an “aggressive following or follower churner” (I had to look that one up), the account finally – and just as randomly – was restored. It wound up taking three days, and I don’t know how many hours and password combinations, to get the account back up and running – but now put an hourly dollar value on those hours, and you begin to get the picture.
In retrospect, I’m amazed that I became so unsettled by the loss of having a social media tool at my daily disposal that, back in the day, I had written off as a teenybopper flash in the pan focused on griping about braces and being grounded for the weekend. I need to tweet about that sometime.
Assuming I still have access.
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