As any brand will tell you, a critical factor in successful online marketing is the ability to capitalize on a potentially disastrous situation and use it to your advantage. That’s exactly what happened Monday morning when a widespread outage on Facebook caused the update status feature to malfunction, instigating what could have been a major headache for a number of brands that rely on the popular social media platform to help market their goods and services and interact with their customers. Instead, some brands recognized the real-time marketing opportunity that the disruption presented and immediately turned the Great Facebook Outage of 2013 into an opportunity to market their products and services.

Here are 5 examples of brands that did not freak out and tried to create a marketing opportunity out of the widespread Facebook disruption.

1) Gillette thought the outage presented the legion of loyal Facebook users an opportunity to get away from their computers and take a little time for themselves in the shower:

2) Going along the theme of getting away from your computer—Red Bull used its multiple worldwide global accounts to encourage it’s followers to go outdoors and get energized:

 

3) For Belgium beer company Jupiter, the Facebook outage represented an opportunity to—what else—drink:

 

4) Waterstones used the outage to promote books. Remember those?

Post by Waterstones.

5) And on the theme of reading—Northwestern University’s college newspapers used the opportunity to promote its own website.