Failing as a Brand Strategy
If you've been using Twitter, you know the issue. The service's reliability has been challenged recently, to say the least. It ranges from minor inconveniences to outright total failure, and Twitter members have seen more than their share of "Twitter is stressing out a bit right now..." messages. Yet Twitter continues. In fact, by most conventional measures it's doing better in terms of members, usage, and loyalty. Sure, there's plenty of discussion at TechCrunch and similar sites that take Twitter and its challenges to task, but the general conversation actually on Twitter is still "we're with you."
Relevant to e-marketers is that technical challenges -- scalability, service levels, and downtime, for example -- remain part of the game for nearly any online application. It happens to all of us. If it doesn't happen, it's generally because we aren't pushing hard enough. Or we're in denial about how our customers define failure and we ignore the conversations they're having among themselves.
