Man down! #gmail
— #Android News (@Android_Nws) January 24, 2014
Yes, yes, the rumors are true.
Gmail went down about a half-hour ago for about 15-minutes.
With so many being dependent on Gmail, many users flocked to Twitter to get some answers. It is, after all, one of the best places to find such breaking news. You can see by the graph below the spike in activity for “gmail” and “#gmail”:
[Click for Larger]
While Gmail use went down, Twitter use went up!
Many tweets were humorous (we shared those on Twitter), others frustrated, while there were plenty of Twitter and Gmail users alike that may have missed the outage completely — it was only 15 minutes!
But there were several organizations that took an Oreo approach to the Gmail outage:
Unlike #Gmail, your pets are always there for you!
— ASPCA (@ASPCA) January 24, 2014
#Gmail's down. Why not spend some time reading about #Fairtrade farmers then? http://t.co/yXAzwvuY1i
— Fairtrade Intl (@FAIRTRADE) January 24, 2014
Not sure what to do while #Gmail is down? How about taking a minute to learn some interesting facts about #Shabbat? http://t.co/go8PRT0zMv
— Jewish Tweets (@JewishTweets) January 24, 2014
#gmail down? Check out our Consumer Sharing Trends Report in the meantime http://t.co/CADnlT2KcX
— ShareThis (@ShareThis) January 24, 2014
#Gmail down? Sounds like a coffee break to me! http://t.co/ravq8LfeF1
— LandofaThousandHills (@1000HillsCoffee) January 24, 2014
#Gmail down? You can check out our Briefing Book while you wait: http://t.co/8htX62Azcw
— Truman Project (@TrumanProject) January 24, 2014
#Gmail down. Time to Netflix…
— Netflix UK & Ireland (@NetflixUK) January 24, 2014
How’s that for a marketing approach?
Has your church or ministry leveraged this kind of activity on Twitter before?
If not, maybe next time. 😉
Michael John Beil says
it was a little frustrating, but humorous at the same time. this was a great and enlightening post, eric :).
we haven’t done much with leveraging this type of issue on twitter before. how about you?
Eric Dye says
I have not – yet. With this outage, I retweeted many of the humorous tweets via @ChurchMag, which was fun, but that’s the closest I’ve come. I’ve got more thinking to do on this, for both ChurchMag AND churches. 🙂