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What could Social Media done for Buckeye CableSystem Outage? If you are a Toledo.com customer or a Northwest Ohio area resident you probably know that our largest ISP, Buckeye CableSystem, had a significant outage last Tuesday afternoon that effected many of it’s customers Internet, phone systems and 911 access. The outage lasted 4 hours and experienced ups and down for 24-48 hours. Leaving 73,000 telephone and 108,000 Internet customers without connections and elderly people in homes without emergency call notification systems. Needless to say, our community’s business, entertainment and safety were all compromised and troubled. I knew this was big when I tried to call Buckeye CableSystem office and the Buckeye CableSystems own support phone lines had failed leaving me unable to get an ETA for restored services. Hours later at my tennis club I learned it was a wide spread event and many people were troubled by the outage. It was a topic of many conversations. The real problem was not the outage, it was the Buckeye’s inability to timely communicate with clients. Shame on their PR department for not having a more effective plan to keep their customers informed on what was happening internally. There were 100’s of tweets and Facebook posts talking about this, but not a single one from Buckeye’s CablesSystem’s own team that I could find. Their PR team certainly knows that a traditional phone, fax, and press release system is not able to ramp up fast enough to provide information to their clients when in a crisis. Take a moment and search the tweets for “buckeye internet”, You will find these and many more. “I wish Buckeye Cable System would get their $!5# together so I wouldn’t have to help my family with internet trouble every $33%&* ing week.” “Hey internet, welcome back. $#!@$! you Buckeye Cable.” How could Buckeye have used Social Media to reduce the negative blowback from their customers and their own image? Buckeye should be proactively using Social Media messaging (tweets and Facebook wall posts) to quickly inform the public that the outage was wide spread, what services were effected and post periodical repair updates. Engaging the negative posts directly and satisfied them with the information the deserved. Many social media users communicate via unaffected cell and smart phones would have been informed. Social media to humanizes the company, not just during a crisis, but at all times. Using social tools allows a company to engage their clients at human level by giving up control of the communication, engage the public and participate in the conversations. This is only successful as a two way street and will require Buckeye’s internal resources at the top level. The bottom line is the public understands service outages occur, products fail, and people make mistakes. But it will not stand for a lack of communication during and after a crisis. Executives all over the country need to realize that we are living in a new world where social media has transferred power to the people (you and me) and the old PR gatekeepers need to be replaced by savvy social media minds. Remember when Jet Blue left 100’s of people the the runway? Look how they are handling things with this Social YouTube Videos. Buckeye should take a tip from them. This dates back to 2007. Buckeye’s $2.50 credit is laughable compared to the pain we felt in the conference room when our client presentations suddenly ended. I assume the refund is some mathematical equation for the time duration of the outage. All we really need is a quick apology and an open forum to communicate with the Buckeye staff. This is much more valuable, rather then a letter in next months bill and a free viewing of Mystic Pizza. Ian Hartten |
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