Mitch Milam's Dynamics CRM and xRM Discussions

I performed an interesting experiment last night that I thought you might enjoy.

Background

I have an Apple iPhone and of course have AT&T for phone service.  For various reasons, I’ve actually always had AT&T for my phone service.  And, I live about three miles from the North end of the Dallas/Ft. Worth International Airport which also happens to be near a junction of three freeways.

This means that I can sometimes experience service interruptions based on time of day, traffic patterns, etc. 

So when AT&T develops issues with their service I can pretty much tell if it’s situational ( localized ) or something else. 

This the “something elseâ€? has been happening on their network this week.  There have been times when their 3G network has simply disappeared.  It has happened so frequently that I have been turning OFF 3G at my house and reverting back to Edge just so my phone will operate.  This is not normal behavior, even for AT&T.

As always, I thought it was just me and I tweeted a couple of complaints about it. Then last night @tekoppele mentioned service coverage in San Francisco was really bad this week. 

Hmm. That is odd. Dallas and San Francisco are half a continent away.  That caused me to wonder if maybe there wasn’t a system-wide issue affecting the AT&T 3G network.

Research

So, I decided to see what other Tweeple were saying and ventured out to http://search.twitter.com and searched for “AT&T service�.

What I found was very interesting:

1. They were indeed having system-wide network issues.
   I saw issues from Dallas, San Francisco, and Denver, just to name a few.
2. They are also having issues with their Internet service.
3. The number of tweets about bad service far exceeded the number of good tweets.
4. AT&T actually has people monitoring the Twitterverse and is handling a number of complains via Twitter.
   Note: @davidyack mentioned this last year in regards to Saturn ( car company ) responding to a tweet about a car he no longer had.

Conclusion

I actually used a search engine to plug into the collective conscience of the Twitterverse for the purposes of researching an issue that I was having just to verify that I wasn’t the only one.

I really don’t keep up with third-party Twitter services and applications so there are probably companies producing solutions to help companies mine this type of data for whatever purposes they wish.

If not, then someone needs to make one.  I can see several possibilities where “trend-spottingâ€? can be useful.