Lessons Learned From Temporary Twitter Account Suspension

Monday Jul 6,2009 04:02 AM
By Mari Smith
In Facebook, Personal Branding, Reputation Management, Social Media, Social Networking, Twitter, account suspension, friendfeed, linkedin, marismith

Twitter apparently got hit by a swarm of spammers earlier today (Sunday), which caused their bots to dump a slew of bona fide accounts, including mine.

I was literally sitting at my computer tweeting from Twhirl when all-of-a-sudden, the login pop-up appeared and said my password wasn’t valid. I went to the web twitter.com/marismith and was horrified to see that Twitter had suspended my account.

After two years on Twitter, organically building a fab following of over 43,000 peeps and in one nanosecond, Twitter can flip the off switch (give us the bird?!). Hm, something just not right about that.

I panicked at first. I went to Facebook and alerted my friend Jesse Stay (@jesse on Twitter); I have to say I was impressed at how Jesse put up a blog post literally within minutes of my comment on his Facebook. Then I saw an email from my bud @Mike_Stelzner saying his Twitter account had also been suspended. Turned out so was @DeniseWakeman, @LouBortone, even @Tweetlater and a whole host of others.

The search.twitter stream started to blow up with the keyword “suspended.” I was sending & receiving text messages, Facebook posts, blog comments. Mashable picked up the story - wowee, and what an honor that Ben Parr included me in the post… (though I wish it were under different circumstances!).

Fortunately, after approximately four hours of down time, Twitter let everyone know via their status.twitter.com blog that the mass of mistakenly suspended Twitter accounts was due to a human error. Hm. Fair enough. No matter how sophisticated the systems, they are only as smart as us humans running them!!

(I also saw something go by about the person being a relatively new member of Twitter’s staff; I’m not sure if this was true or not but it is just a tad disconcerting that this new member of staff had the ability to suspend what I was apparently over 100,000 accounts today!)

In any case, I’d like to personally thank all my peeps for their kind support, encouragement and action steps in moving this big hiccup to a happy ending for all: @Jesse @CoachDeb @Mike_Stelzner @JoelComm @BenParr @AllenMireles @TimothyCarter @Tweetlater @JimKukral @24k @KatherineCHE @SherylRoush and many, many more fab friends on Facebook with over 150 comments on my various updates. You ROCK!!

Lessons Learned From My Twitter Timeout:

1) Twitter has become an inextricable part of my life and business. My eyes, ears and thoughts filter almost everything through, “Would this be of value to share with my peeps on Twitter?” “What has my attention right now that would be inspiring, uplifting to others?” “How can I get creative and come up with new ways of sharing?” Not only that, Twitter is by far one of the most efficient and effective methods of communicating, both individually and to large groups. I was stopped in my tracks at not being able to even just DM!

2) Twitter is only one platform for visibility, branding, community building and connecting. It’s vital to your social media success to be diversified and have a) a built-out Facebook profile (unless you’re choosing to only use your profile for close personal friends/family), b) a built-out Facebook Fan Page, c) an active blog with increasing subscribers, d) an active account on LinkedIn with increasing contacts e) an active channel on YouTube, f) an active, built-out account on FriendFeed… and many, many more platforms.

3) Even though Twitter - and most all other social networking platforms - are completely free, they are never to be taken for granted and ideally, never trashed. Twitter is run by humans; we are all human. It’s important to speak up and rally the troops to disseminate the right information and support, but not to speak badly about others/companies. I had every faith (after a fleeting moment of panic, even shedding a tear!), that Twitter would reinstate my account today!

How about you? Whether your account was suspended or not, what lessons can you takeaway from this experience? Please share in the Comments below.