How I learned my Internet was down from Twitter

What does it say about cor­po­rate pub­lic rela­tions when I can­not learn from my cable com­pany why my cable Internet ser­vice isn’t work­ing? What does it say about cor­po­rate pub­lic rela­tions when I can instead learn about the out­age from Twitter?

The story: Bresnan Internet ser­vice went out at my house at about 8 p.m. last night. I reset the cable modem, the wi-fi routers, all the stuff Bresnan techs ask you to do when you call them. Nothing. It was becom­ing clear that the prob­lem was on Bresnan’s end.

That was proved when I tried to call Bresnan sev­eral times. The result: my calls were either imme­di­ately dis­con­nected, answered by dead air, cut off after two rings or answered by a record­ing that said all the cir­cuits were busy. The issue was clearly on their end.

With no Internet to enter­tain us, we played Scrabble and read books and had a gen­uinely retro evening.

In the morn­ing, ser­vice was still out, so when I came to work to my work­ing Internet con­nec­tion, I Google search for “Bresnan out­age.” That pro­duced few mean­ing­ful results, though it did lead me to a Great Falls Tribune story about the out­age, lit­tle more than a brief, really. Google also led to another story from KJCT in Colorado, but the infor­ma­tion was basi­cally the same.

Bresnan’s Web site was a dead end, information-wise. No acknowl­edge­ment of the prob­lem on its home­page, no pub­lic response or news for cus­tomers. Nothing.

At this point, I turned to Twitter for news. I searched Twitter for “Bresnan” and found lots of peo­ple had the same prob­lems I did. No one had any new infor­ma­tion, of course, but it was inter­est­ing to see how wide an area the out­age affected, and it was com­fort­ing to know that I wasn’t the only per­son unable to reach Bresnan tech support.

I sup­pose the moral here is that Bresnan should be on top of this sort of cri­sis with an emer­gency pub­lic infor­ma­tion cam­paign. Instead, peo­ple on Twitter have already cre­ated the hash­tag #bres­nan­fail and are bash­ing the company’s appar­ent lack of responsiveness.

Granted, Bresnan’s prob­a­bly work­ing as fast as it can to repair the prob­lem, but in a socially net­worked world, that’s not enough, not when the opin­ions of the affected can be broad­cast world­wide instantly (pro­vided they can find a work­ing Net connection).

And Twitter... I’ll admit, it didn’t give me any hard facts that I didn’t have before. Mostly, peo­ple are report­ing their own Bresnan trou­bles, which is good for com­mis­er­at­ing, but it’s not quite news cov­er­age. Yet at this point, I’m pretty sure that I’ll learn the new facts about the out­age from Twitter first, rather than from Bresnan or from a main­stream news outlet.

I sup­pose we’re look­ing at the emer­gence of some sort of new jour­nal­ism here: a way to find facts that are impor­tant to you, the indi­vid­ual, not to every­one (the “read­ers” or the “public”).

More refined thoughts to come later, I think.