I know you’ve heard me profess my love for Twitter before but here’s another reason:

Last week, I noticed an error occuring with aMember plugin and 1ShoppingCart.  In a nutshell, 1ShoppingCart wasn’t passing renewal information to aMember so people were being locked out of their member accounts.  The payment was being processed in 1ShoppingCart and showing the correct renewal term but aMember was showing the term as starting and stopping on the same day.  I had filled out a ticket with 1ShoppingCart and received the following reply:

Thank you for bringing this matter to my attention. I alerted the Development Team and they are working towards a resolution. For your reference the Task ID is 9204; please feel free to contact us anytime for an update. While I do not know when this matter will be resolved it is extremely serious and we do take it seriously. Once this issue has been rectified I will be in contact with you.

I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you in the mean time and thank you for your patience and understanding. Thank you.

So it was a waiting game.  I had done my part, troubleshooted the issue as far as I could, provided Order IDs of orders that were being processed incorrectly and even going back in our member records to discover when the problem first started occurring.

About a week later, I saw a tweet from Christina Hills:

I replied:

And that was that.  Or so I thought. 

The next day, I received a tweet from Michael Valliant who works at 1ShoppingCart.  Somehow my tweet got on his radar (there are services like Google Alerts that will alert you when your name or a keyword has been tweeted.  My favorite is TweetBeep) and he sent me this tweet:

How do you like ‘dem apples?  My problem was noticed and acted upon within 12 hours just from a random conversation I had on Twitter.  I hear stories like that all the time.  If you’re not on Twitter, you really should be.  You’re missing out on an amazing network of incredibly resourceful and helpful people who are there simply to create, connect and share. 

I’m on Twitter, why aren’t you?