Last night Twitter died... well not completely but for a bit there a few folks who have spent a whole lot of time becoming a big deal on Twitter collectively held their breathe and prayed. They prayed that Twitter would at least show them a Fail Whale... something, anything... I mean, these folks have built no small measure of their professional worth on their Twitter network and the relationships they've built there.
Then a funny thing happened... a bunch of them just popped over to Google Plus and carried on.
If they were already there, they spent maybe a little bit more time than usual in Google's new network, adding friends to Circles, searching for their long lost Twitter buddies... and adding them to Circles. If they were new, they started to get seriously inquisitive, playing with the new platform, learning and asking questions of their friends they found there.
So what's the point you may be asking...
How about this... the unimaginable can happen. Trust me, I along with a great many of my fellow New Orleanians found this out the hard way a few years back when a nasty rain storm closed our city for a month and caused every client in my still nascent ad agency to effectively fire us at the same time. Does your business have a plan for that scenario? Does any?
If that rather unlikely scenario can happen in the real world, it can certainly happen in a virtual one.
So just something to think about this morning as you sip your latte... are you building your conversational marketing around a solid base, one that you can store, retrieve and easily port from one network to another? Or are you taking the easy/cheap way out and just renting those all important relationships from a landlord that might just go out of business without so much as a Tweet?
PHOTO BY: http://humor.removestress.net