We recently started a Twitter account for Danica (@DanicaRacing) meant to update fans on news and updates from her official site (www.DanicaRacing.com). Realizing the activation can be much more than just facilitating news we’ve been looking at numerous options to engage fans and integrate Danica’s sponsors. This past weekend though proved Twitter’s reliability is still up in the air.

Sunday marked the opening of 2010 Indycar season, and just as we were about to post some practice and quailfying updates our timeline was frozen so no updates could be made. We checked the Twitter status notices and saw that indeed our very problem had been listed 4 hours prior. We commend Twitter for being on top of their status problems, but at this stage in the game it’s become all to a familiar story with “over capacity” notices or full fledged shut downs like we experienced that happen randomly.

It finally got back to working correctly about mid-way through the race, but our immediate thinking went to – we’re going to try and pitch sponsors on being involved in various activations through the account, and most likely a big part of that will be on raceday, and we’ll have to be worried about the service even working.

As much as Twitter wants to be part of the mainstream marketing circle, their continual service problems make it that much more difficult for marketers to truly sell the benefits. We look forward to integrating Danica’s – and our other athlete client’s – sponsors on Twitter, but we also look forward to the day we when can firmly say that Twitter is a reliable platform.