10-30-13 | Blog Post
Before there was Twitter and LinkedIn, companies felt that it was better to hide bad news from customers. Airlines wouldn’t tell passengers why there was a delay. Hosting companies wouldn’t tell you about an outage or when dial up lines wouldn’t work.
Now with the adoption of social media, companies are becoming more transparent and sharing all types of company news or information – good or bad. The cloud computing and data center industry is no different.
In this video, Yan Ness discusses how social media has impacted cloud computing providers.
With the introduction of social media, customers were allowed to speak with one another without the company’s permission. It put companies on the defensive. Once someone had a bad experience, he or she told everyone. So companies had a choice to make. Be more transparent and less secretive or remain quiet and let their customers do the talking.
In the beginning, the data center industry was scared of being more open. They thought it would cause a lot of problems. But what it did was tighten the trust level between customers and companies.
For those companies that decided to jump in the “social media sandbox” and started to use social media tools, like Twitter or LinkedIn to share important information such as service interruptions, found they raised their customer trust level.
Cloud computing providers now tell their customers what is going on and what they are doing while the interruption is happening rather than have customers talk about it themselves. This is exactly what you want from a maturing industry. You want a really high degree of trust between customers and cloud computing providers.
