Chameleon PR

I don’t normally go in for the ‘stroppy journo berates PR person for daring to send an email’ type rants, but this one is a nice little reminder from Cliff Saran at Computer Weekly that PRs (well, anyone really)should think before hitting send.

By playing the green card it’s far more of a moral stance than the usual ‘everybody else is stupid’ huffiness.

We recently started working with Resolver Systems, a company that develops an advanced, programmable spreadsheet called Resolver One.

 Now, given that the spreadsheet has been around a while, and that Microsoft Excel dominates the scene, we had to don a few more thinking caps than normal when developing a PR programme for Resolver.

After much research, strategy and brainstorms (with and without beer) we came up with our ‘killer app.’

Being super-powerful, Resolver One is able to number crunch way beyond ‘standard’ spreadsheets such as Microsoft Excel and its lookalikes. The target market is ‘quants’ – the big-brained people that analyse reams of data to turn it from ‘numbers’ to ‘insight.’

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Just as soon as London was announced as the Tweeting capital of the world, Twitter was pulled down to its knees by what the FT said could have simply been nothing more than a teenage prank.

That had me thinking two things. Firstly, how did London manage to cope without its beloved microservice? Within hours #whentwitterwasdown had already become a trending topic. Faced with the prospect of not being able to tell the masses all the pointless junk that tends to swim inside my head on a Thursday afternoon was tough! I had resorted to writing random messages on post-it notes and sticking them to my screen, in an effort to cope without my fix.

But Twitter is not simply for personal status updates. It’s equally used by organisations for advertising, marketing and competition purposes, to name a few. So my second thought was this; How much money did those two hours or so of downtime cost the Twittersphere?

How many competitions were stalled? How many customer service channels of communication were hindered? Whilst it might seem far-fetched that companies could lose any money in that short space of time, I actually tried somewhere different for lunch on Thursday, instead of listening to the food shop round the corner’s Tweets telling me that they had my favourite soup of the day. So there’s £3.15 worth of damage already…

But I wonder, with millions of Tweeters affected, how much could the damage potentially have been in total?