Today the uber popular social media microblog site Twitter is under attack…again. This time a hacker has found a chink in twitter’s security and exploited it to allow a user to control who follows them. This is a major security failure and we are not quite sure how all of this will turn out yet.

Twitter Get’s Attacked and Hacked Back To Zero

Here you can see that the ZS following/followers is showing a count of zero and zero, yet our hundreds of followers tweets are still showing up in our tweetstream. Surely we are there will be millions of tweeple today asking the same ridiculous question:

Slice of Conversation From The Twitter Zero Attack

Some comments on Mashable just after the news of the twitter attack broke.

Rumors of Turkish hackers

Frustration

Insight

Questions That Need To Be Asked, Post Zero Attack

1. If ALL of your Twitter followers, your entire twitter social graph disappeared overnight via a attack or and ill TOS/policy change how damaging would it be to your reputation, career, company or organization?
2. If ALL of the time you have invested into twitter networking, communicating, communities, list building, research was lost due to an hacker attack what would you do? What is your backup strategy?
3. Do you have at least one redundant connection with each twitter follower on another social network or platform (Facebook, Google Friend Connect, Email/Contacts etc) as a proxy social graph/social backup? What is your redundancy/cross-networking process like?
4. Do you trust that Twitter is a reliable platform and that it will be there for you when you need to use it? How reliable is Twitter really?
5. How many times has Twitter personally or professionally failed you? Given the width or the social sea out there what are your viable alternatives?

Five Microblog Strategy Tips From Zero Strategist

1. Develop a microblog/social media backup plan so WHEN Twitter goes down or gets attacked AGAIN you are not dead in the water waiting for one service to come back up.
2. ALWAYS backup your tweets periodically if they are important, several solutions exist for this
3. Diversify your risk exposure to any one social media platform and never invest all of your social capital in any one platform, distribute them across your social media presence. Yes, think of it as a microblog stock market portfolio.
4. Develop a holistic social media strategy from ZERO (from the very beginning) that way when things go wrong with one part or piece of your strategy, just shift your time, effort and social capital to another venue.
5. Do NOT evangelize any one social platform. Social networks and microblogs they come and they go. Remember the social history lessons of fails, bad strategy and slow fades of Bebo, Friendster, MySpace, iYomu, The Hub.

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