It’s worked fine for three years but this morning is down. Argh! Have we done something wrong?

No. It’s not us, it’s Gmail. And it’s down across the world.

What’s interesting is how we found out. 20 minutes before there was anything in Google News, it was all over the micro blogging service Twitter. At one point 100 people a second were tweeting that their Gmail was down.

You can follow it with a simple Twitter search, or using a clever application like Twitterfall.

An important part of PR is connecting to your audience in the way they want to be communicated with. Right now, Twitter is a hot way of talking to people.

Our friends at Bytestart have a very useful guide to using Twitter in your business.

UPDATE: Our email is back! And apparently, Google’s London PR team couldn’t send out a statement… because their email was down!

It’s a great example of picking your medium carefully, especially if you are trying to appeal to consumers. If your company is trying to be perceived as “cool”, appearing in your local paper could send the wrong message.

Actually, putting the wrong kind of content in the right medium could be just as damaging – if you wrote in a formal way on MySpace, that would be disastrous.