Entrepreneurs "Tweet" Their Way Through Crises

September 15, 2009 at 11:00 am PT

Twitter has turned out to be a useful tool for some small businesses coping with customer-service or public-relations crises.

The social-media service–where users send short “tweets” to followers who have signed up to receive the messages–came in handy for Innovative Beverage Group Holdings Inc., whose drankbeverage.com site crashed last month after a surge in traffic following a segment on Fox News for the company’s so-called relaxation beverage, which contains “calming” ingredients like valerian root and melatonin. News Corp. (NWS) owns Fox News as well as The Wall Street Journal.

Innovative Beverage notified consumers on its Twitter feed that it was working to resolve the problem. The company also did a search on Twitter for mentions of the site crash, so it could respond with tweets describing its repair efforts.

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Tagged with: Beverage Group Holdings, crash, digital, drankbeverage.com, Fox News, frontpage, Inc., Internet, News Corp., Relaxation, repair, Sarah E. Needleman, social media, social networking, The Wall Street Journal, tweets, Twitter

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