Is The Cloud Down?
@Dropbox love dropbox, but please let us know you're down when you are, rather than us running around in the dark tweeting 'is dropbox down? – As Seen On Twitter
Is Dropbox Down?
On a Sunday morning, Dropbox went down. When my text-editor Editorial refused to sync while writing a blog, I went over to the Dropbox app and realized it couldn't access any files. Looking like a big problem, I hit up my inside contact – Twitter.
“Is Dropbox down?” I asked the Twitterverse.
We all asked, but it took an hour before the Twitter Dropbox support account started responding to individual tweets about a problem that was obviously quite large, with still no official response from the main Dropbox Twitter account where most users would be looking.
To it's credit, Dropbox does list its hours of monitoring the Twitter support account as M-F 8-7 CST. However, this is the cloud and many folks and apps rely on Dropbox 24-7.
Is Your Social Media Policy Down?
Ok, so we learn once more that the cloud is not always a pink hearts, yellow moons, orange stars, green clovers and magically delicious box to drop our data into. Perhaps closer to my bowl of cereal, the Dropbox outage shows how important it is to always monitor our social media channels, especially if our customers or clients depend upon our business solution 24/7.
Some businesses can be praised with sticking a M-F 8-7 CST response expectation in their Twitter bios, but others need to consider the nature of their business and adjust their response times accordingly.
A simple public tweet when a huge problem exists can go a long way toward restoring the green clovers for customers affected by an outage, but it also gives supporters something to reshare. Even just a simple three word “We're on it” response can remove customer fears while reducing negative sentiment as your response gets retweeted.
Have a social media policy that is up when your pink hearts are down. It's just good customer experience that takes little effort and protects your brand image.
The last type of tweet we want retweeted about us, is this kind:
@Dropbox Excellent product, but your customer service is rubbish… You've been down most of the day and you don't bother to provide info! – As Seen On Twitter
