Twitter downtime highlights need for a traditional and modern marketing mix

Twitter downtime highlights need for a traditional and modern marketing mix

My digital footprint is sizeable and I can twit, stumble, blog and flickr like there is no tomorrow. I am even writing this blog post on my phone on the train in to work. Yesterday, for one brief moment, it looked like there would be no tomorrow in social networking terms.

Yesterday, when Twitter, Facebook and other social networking resources went down, thanks to a coordinated and malicious Distributed Denial of Service attack (the name of a seemingly brilliant unmade Will Smith blockbuster), I was bereft and pondering a question. What did small businesses do to market themselves before the Internet?

At the Marketing Donut, as a web based resource, we do focus a lot on the modern marketing mix of online complementing the traditional. So while there may have been people out on the streets walking aimlessly like zombies, many carried on regardless.

Anecdotal evidence from fully fledged professional marketers came through on Twitter after the down time. Twitter for Business expert, Mark Shaw and one of our very own Donut experts both reported their ignorance of any Twitter downtime and relief they were away from their computers as they were at actual face to face meetings with clients.

If yesterday highlighted anything to me and the small business owner, it is that all the new online get up is brilliant when it works but should not be relied upon as a sole means of marketing activity. Of course, there are a whole variety of simple and effective ways in which small business interact with their customers in the 'real world'. Despite the rise of social networking, businesses still push for coverage in their local media, they still distribute promotional leaflets to target customers, they still concentrate on friendly and professional customer service as a way of generating word-of-mouth recommendation. These - and many other marketing techniques - are practices that have stood the test of time and will always be immune to the impact of malicious denial of service attacks like the one that took Twitter down yesterday.

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