It’s not because Twitter is free that we give them a wide berth and hit refresh and try again. Twitter is constantly down. It’s how Twitter deal with the failure that tames our frustration. Facebook would never get away with the same amount of downtime yet it’s also free and in the same social media space as Twitter…why are our expectations for Facebook different?
Fail often yet we feel empathy not upset
How much time do you give to creating a positive experience in the face of meltdown? There are books on this stuff. They teach us that technical failures are not the end of the relationship. Handled well and happening infrequently they can generate further engagement and even positive engagement with our most passionate advocates.
Take a day to write and then rewrite your error handling engagement.
Unforgiving Error
The twitter whale illustration is so cute – how can you be annoyed at a wee smiley whale being held up by gorgeous little birdies?!! You can’t! Cuteness rules.
Good 404 error pages are a must and go some way to reduce frustrations & relationship problems, but I also think, in this case, as far as I’m concerned, Twitter isn’t as important to me like other services such as Google, so it can get away with it a little. Also, there is little competition within the same industry (It’s quite unique)
This brings me to the point of competitors. For this example I will use browsers, Firefox and Chrome. Firefox has kept crashing to install updates for the last 4 months. This didn’t bother me at first because it provided me with a very modest popup saying that it was their fault, they will try to recover the webpages I was working on. Fair enough, they did. This worked up to the point that I started using Chrome. I have permanently switched browsers due to the better stability and speed.
Lesson to be learnt here is to manage your 404’s. Stop them happening, because one of your competitors could end up with one of your potential customers. Always to check for 404’s in your analytics. Monitor constantly!
Thats was a bit of a rant. Glad I got it off my chest. lol