If anything, the blackout during the Super Bowl confused things even more regarding where companies should target their communications to customers. A multi-modal approach still seems to be the answer.

Okay, so the blackout—

The lights went out in the Superdome in New Orleans during last Sunday’s game. Because it takes a while for stadium lights to get up and running again, the entire Super Bowl-watching world—about 107 million viewers, according to the Washington Post—had to wait a little over a half hour for the game to resume.

What to do, what to do?

Well, a few brand names knew exactly what to do… they immediately turned to social networking to reach out to their customers.

Hubspot’s Inbound Marketing Blog posted a list of some of the brand names that were savvy enough to take advantage of the blackout.

“As the lights went out at last night’s Super Bowl, we were all bombarded with viewer reactions on our personal social networks,” writes Anum Hussain. “Whether the cause was Beyonce’s fierce performance or something else is unclear, but what was clear is that there are plenty of brands out there that were clever enough to instantly play upon the outage, newsjacking it on their social media networks.”

Here are a couple tweets—

• Walgreens: We do carry candles…we also sell lights.
• Audi: Sending some LEDs to the @MBUSA Superdome right now…
• Tide: We can’t get your #blackout, but we can get your stains out.

And an ad—

Oreo: You can still dunk in the dark.

What these brands did was take advantage of the right communication tool at the right time. In this case, it was social media during an interrupted Super Bowl when people were likely checking their social media anyway.

So, how do you reach customers? With every tool in the tool shed, and the right tool at the right time.