Like many others, I woke up yesterday morning to find Twitter down. While I was trying to check Twitter, my wife was trying to get at her Facebook page and was surprised at how slow it was. "The internet is slow!" she exclaimed. A few minutes later I caught the report on the fact that Twitter had experienced a denial of service attack.
Based on today’s reports, it appears that the denial of service attack was a Russian attack on a Georgian citizen who had made politically charged comments about the Russo-Georgian conflict last year. As I will not use my blog to express any kind of political agenda, I will not make any comment about the incident that caused this. It is not important to the issue at hand. What is important is that hundreds of thousands of people were affected by a political argument between two people when one of them attacked both Twitter and Facebook and thereby denied service to the innocent bystanders.
Organizations around the world see social media as the future of customer growth and they are spending large sums of money on very expensive people to advance their social web marketing agendas. Anyone who knows anything about this will tell you that you cannot control the social media – you have to work with it. Your company has to learn to roll with the punches and leverage the goodwill of the networks of which you are a member. This means that your company has to use the standard infrastructures that are in place and therefore your company relies on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn among others to get its message out.
The problem with those infrastructures is that your company cannot be guaranteed of their stability. This is the second attack on Twitter in a few weeks. Facebook has been hit several times, too, and you can be sure that this will not be the last time. As these sites grow in popularity they become greater and greater targets for attack by people. The more they become objects of attack, the more they will be improved to resist the attacks, but one has to wonder how long audiences will be prepared to accept these kinds of problems. One only has to look at the radical decline of MySpace to understand how fickle people are and how quickly popularity can shift from one medium to another.
Francois-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire once said "Better one lion than a pack of rats" in reference the impending French Revolution. What he meant is that a pack of rats cannot make up its mind and each has its own agenda whereas with one lion you at least know what the rules are. Nowhere is this philosophy more applicable than with social media. You are allowing your business to be driven by the media – the pack of rats.
Remember, though, that the French Revolution happened anyway. You have no alternative but to let social media shape your business. And therein lies the risk. As a business trying to build a marketing campaign, it is easy to arrive at the conclusion that any one of these media could be used as the primary focus of the strategy. You may even conclude that you only have to focus on one or two of them to grow your business. Some companies have gone as far as relying completely on social media as there only marketing strategy. You have to make sure that your strategy has several contingencies to deal with what happens if those forums become unavailable as happened with Twitter yesterday.
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