Twitter lacking of customer relationship strategy: blaming its best usersfor technical problems

Scoble wrote an article on How Twitter is blaming its best users for its frequent (way too frequent) technical problems.
Twitter is the leading micro blogging service, allowing million of users to share what they are doing at the instant. But the fact is that after having known a tremendous growth, the service is constantly experiencing technical problems. You can't post, you can't see previous twits from friends, and so on.

Twitter is explaining its problems because its best users are using too much the service, and they can't deal with the amount of twits received.

'The events that hit our system the hardest are generally when “popular” users - that is, users with large numbers of followers and people they’re following - perform a number of actions in rapid succession. This usually results in a number of big queries that pile up in our database(s). Not running scripts to follow thousands of users at a time would be a help, but that’s behavior we have to limit on our side.'

 This is totally wrong. You can't blame your best users, the people that are promoting your service, because they are enjoying your service. The problem is that they have not been able to set up a structure that would be able to manage the fast growth of the service. But this is not the fault of your users if you are not able to satisfy them.

 If you propose something you must deliver. Also if they can't deal with the increasing number of twits, they should close the registration explaining that the platform can't accept anybody else at this time. Because it is better to make people wait than to accuse your users to drive technical issues. As a company, you must offer the best service as possible, because these people represents one of your core assets, especially for a web 2.0 company which value is based on the number of users.


So Twitter, please, stop accepting people that you won't be able to please, and focus on your best users, because they are the one that could save you during these bad days. Maybe this example shows that it is still important to have public relations skills, in order to give better response to the public.

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