PNM’s social media saves Santa Fe adventure

Earlier this month I spent a long weekend in Santa Fe, NM. It’s an annual trip, and we purposely go in the minutes before winter hits the high desert in order to avoid fellow tourists just like us. We’re careful planners, since we know the weather in northern New Mexico at this time of year can be brutal and turn on a dime. In early November we suddenly become addicted to Weather Underground, we pull up Google maps and pull out furry earmuffs. We know all the wind channels and dust storm possibilities in the hundreds of miles of I-40 between here and there.

Due to that careful, obsessive planning, waking up to snow on that first Santa Fe morning wasn’t a surprise, but the massive power outage was. In all our minute attention to minute detail, we hadn’t counted on the emergence of chaos theory---things rarely go as perfectly planned.

So, we’d planned to sit by the fire a bit, enjoy the snow. We had that mental picture in our heads. But, we hadn’t planned to eat M and Ms and road trip snack foods for breakfast because the restaurant was closed, nor that we’d have to sit huddled together by that gorgeous fire in the hotel lobby with four layers of clothing squinting to read by the gray light that filtered through snow flurries.

Turns out the light and lovely snow wasn’t to blame for this outage, however. A tree fell onto some transmission lines and knocked out power to downtown Santa Fe for a little over three hours. Even without power, I knew this within an hour of the first light flicker. How? My phone still had juice and the local utility, PNM (formerly Public Service Co. of New Mexico in full), has a Twitter feed.

Now, I’ve never been one of those people who adore social media. I often think it’s odd that everyone believes I want to see pictures of their dogs, know what they had for breakfast or comment on their latest viewing of American Horror Story. What I realized during this Santa Fe trip, however, is that social media like Twitter allows utilities to send out valuable information to thousands without the necessity of massive phone banks or even having to adjust HTML coding on large and unwieldy websites. It’s simple and easy---and in this case, incredibly effective. Within two minutes and 140 characters, I knew exactly why the power went out.

PNMtalk: 10,450 w/p power due to 9 a.m. Santa Fe transmission outage. N-Tano Norte S-Camino Sudest E-Paseo Primero W-Legacy. Crews working.

PNMtalk: PNM crews removing tree from a transmission line and making repairs. Estimating a noon restore for Santa Fe customers.

Those two tweets made me a convert. We knew what happened and an estimate of restoration. So, we bundled up and went outside. We enjoyed the snow and the cold and, in fact, were in a Santa Fe café by 12:30 eating huevos rancheros with all power restored.

Pike Research recently released a new report on utilities and social media, labeling the use “somewhat chaotic” in our industry. There are concerns about controlling information and conversations between the employees and the consumers on the utility end of things. Those concerns may be valid, but, from the consumer side of the equation, up-to-date, quick information during outages is invaluable and worth a little risk.

In the report, Pike estimates that about 57 million customers will talk to utilities over social media in 2011, with that number leaping to 624 million by the end of 2017. So, perhaps others should take note from PNM’s clever use, as social media isn’t going away anytime soon. In an outage, what I've got is my phone. And Twitter is easiest to access from there. It's simple, and it's logical.

There’s nothing worse than being in the dark---both literally and figuratively. With a couple of tweets, PNM lit up on our dark situation, allowing us to figure out a good timetable. Hooray, the outage wasn’t going to last forever. The darkness wasn’t going to eat our vacation. We weren’t going to run out of M and Ms and start eyeing each other’s femurs. PNM used 140 characters to put our minds at ease, and that is the power of social media, especially Twitter---a lot of consumers in the know instead of in the dark. That has great potential.

And, while I was impressed that PNM was on the cutting edge of Twitter-adoption, I was even more impressed with their estimate of restoration---they were bang on the money. We noticed that lights were back on in shops and businesses at about 12:08, and we went about the rest of our vacation more thankful for PNM’s Twitter feed than for our Google maps, furry earmuffs or road trip M and Ms.

And, before next year’s Santa Fe trip, I’m going to take a look at their Twitter feed. Just in case.