Twitter Shakes out the Earthquake News

Twitter once again shows its power over virtually any other medium. It was at approximately 2 pm EST and I started to see tweets saying EARTHQUAKE. It was within moments the Twitter stream was filled with Tweets from all over the eastern seaboard of people who were affected. Cell phone coverage was down for many but Twitter was there to keep the communications going.

I have been a proactive member of the Twitter community for some time now and have seen its value over and over again. This is another case in point on why it is so important to have different mediums available to communicate with your customers. If this event affected your clients and all of their phones did not work, then what would you do? Social media has given us the ability to not only market but to effectively and quickly get information out to the people who need it.

So what can we learn from this? First of all, do you know if your employees and customers are on Twitter? Find out. Create lists based on your information. Begin using and experimenting with Twitter and determine what direction your approach needs to be. Test it out as a communication medium and then go from there. As businesses, it is our responsibility to be where our clients are.

Hopefully, this will be a decent wakeup call for those who have not dug into Twitter to at least give it a shot. I have found this platform to be one of the most important tools in my arsenal. My deepest sympathies to all those whose lives have been affected by this event.  How about you? How do you think Twitter plays a part in our strategy? Share your thoughts in the comment section below.