Any time Twitter experiences an outage, users see the following error message:
When Twitter first began, the site would crash frequently. Fans began referring to the error message as the “Fail Whale.”
Any time the site was down, the company’s co-founder Biz Stone was responsible to communicate what was happening to the public. Stone could have chosen to hide during these times and let his audience wait and wait until the social media site was up and running. It would have been easy (and understandable) for Stone to avoid Twitter’s fans during these outages.
But Stone chose a different route.
In his book, Things a Little Bird Told Me, Stone said he believed that “explaining mistakes to the people who used our service was the best way to create a long tern relationship with them.”
Stone decided it was important to let his audience know what really happened when the site was down, and how his team was going to fix it.
He didn’t believe in PR spin.
Prior to Apple’s development conference in 2007, there was a major buzz that an announcement was upcoming about the first ever iPhone. All the excitement put a strain on the Twitter servers. There were constant outages and users feared that Twitter would not be able to hold up.
Stone and the staff at Twitter worked late into the night on the evening prior to the expected announcement from Apple. The Twitter users guessed that the social media platform was working feverishly to bolster the service for the next day.
Suddenly there was a knock on the office door at Twitter headquarters. It was a pizza delivery guy.
Only, no one from Stone’s company had ordered pizza.
The a user Tweeted at Stone, “Did you get our pizza?”
Inexplicably, rather than complaining about the outages on the site, the Twitter community was sending their support in the form of pizza.
Stone later wrote that, “We weren’t some anonymous robots who frustrated them with our bugs and glitches. All out honesty had revealed our humanity and brought us goodwill.”
I think this is a great lesson for any business.
Your business is used by individuals, so treat them as such. Don’t hide when things are crashing. Be honest, be human, admit your mistakes, and you just might get a pizza.
Photo credit: Wikipedia
