With Social Media Success, Comes Pressure to Meet Expectations
August 4, 2008 by Eric Eggertson
Filed under Marketing
You have to feel sorry for social media companies.
Take Obvious Corp., creators of the messaging/microblogging service Twitter.
The Little Service that Could grew quickly attracted millions of users, who all expected Twitter to be available, reliable and responsive to their needs. Instead, there have been regular outages, reduced features and occasional customer service lapses.
The more they succeed, they more pressure they face.
Inevitably, they can’t be everything to everyone. In some cases, they can’t even meet some basic expectations.
Success sucks, eh?
When success comes quicker than a company is prepared for, it can certainly backfire.
A few months ago when Twitter was really suffering with the ‘fail whale’ they did a very good job of communicating the issue via their blog.
For me that showed how you could use radical transparency to attract respect and understanding… and more importantly, patyience from users.