Twitter Fail WhaleYesterday, Twitter, Facebook, and LiveJournal got hit with denial of service attacks which brought all of these services down for several hours. While they eventually managed to get a handle on the attacks, they’ve still experienced intermittent problems throughout the rest of the day. Now Twitter, Facebook, and Google are working together to investigate the source of the attacks.

Now if you’re on Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal, LinkedIn…or any of these social networking services really, what does this mean to you?

1. Even the big boys get taken down from time to time.

2. It’s always a good idea to have a Plan B…a place to go when the big boys shut down.

These big social networking sites are a great way to promote yourself and to meet new people. But it’s never a good idea to base all of your marketing activity on any one place, especially if it’s not under your direct control.

Say you get most of your new potential customers from LinkedIn and LinkedIn goes away because it goes bankrupt or gets sold or for whatever reason that causes these big website to shut down. What happens to your contacts then?

What if Etsy is the only place where you sold your work online? What happens if there’s some kind of outage that shuts the website down for several hours or even several days? What happens to your sales then?

What if your main web presence is an artist portfolio web service? What happens if the service suddenly announces that they are going to double (or even triple) their monthly fee? Do you drop the service or try to make room for the increase in your overstretched budget?

These things can and often do happen, so it’s important that you have ways to keep control of your online presence and your online contacts apart from these services. Find ways to gather the contact information of your Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter friends so you don’t have to depend on those networks to contact your friends. The easiest way to do this is to invite them to join your mailing list on your blog or your website. You can also make backups of your Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn profiles. A recent article on Web Workly Weekly listed a couple of “social networking backup” services that do just that. If you do a lot on any of these services this article is worth the read.

Take the time to create your own blog or your own website and encourage your social networking friends to visit. If you have a Blogger or a Wordpress.com blog as your only web presence, consider self hosting it or setting up a simple website as your own “home base”. If something happens to your blog you’ll still have another place for your readers and potential customers to visit.

Remember…don’t put all of your marketing eggs in one social media basket. Hold on to all your social networking contacts, always have home base like a website or blog that’s under your control….and always have a Plan B.