The power of Twitter
Last Friday I was talking to a friend who told me that their Grandparents had been without a Telstra landline service for 6 days, they were also elderly and both suffered medical conditions that they need access to Emergency Services if their condition deteriorates.
After tweeting this & this less than half an hour later I was on the phone with @JonoH a Manager at Telstra who kindly offered to resolve the problem. After gathering some more info, Jono this onto the Landline repair group who responded with the actual cause of the outage (previous calls to Telstra’s customer support were unable to provide this information previously for some unknown reason). The reason the landline was not working (and for > 1000 other residents) was some vandalism to the Telstra equipment in the local area. The following day around 11am the problem was fixed, which was a fantastic result.
This just goes to show that Twitter is a powerful tool to communicate not only with your friends, but with major companies as well. Most major companies have employees who are on twitter either by choice, or as part of their job and twitter is a good medium to collect independent information about your company and to reach out to the community and help people in need.
I’d like to thank Jono from Telstra who helped out Friday night and the repair guys who fixed the problem early Saturday morning
