Am I the only BlackBerry user in the world that was not affected by last week’s outage? Seriously, I only became aware that there was a problem on Monday afternoon when T-Mobile sent me a text to apologise about the lack of incoming and outgoing emails, Internet and BlackBerry messenger. But still, they kept on coming. I guess I was one of the lucky ones.
By Tuesday it had become apparent that there were a lot of unhappy BlackBerry customers out there. So how did BlackBerry manufacturer Research in Motion respond? Well, incredibly badly seems to be the unanimous response. A PR disaster, said some. A masterclass in how not to do PR, said others. An example of how not to do crisis communication, said Alastair Campbell.
Poor old BlackBerry. To be perfectly honest it’s hard to believe that RIM’s profile in the UK media could have sunk to a lower level than it did this April when co-CEO Mike Lazaridis pulled the plug on an interview with the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones, following what must have been an obvious question regarding RIM’s recent security spats with governments in India and the Middle East. He must have seen that one coming. And then there was the Playbook flop and of course, the riots.
And so we come to RIM’s latest PR calamity. In a crisis, people want information. Yes, they want their mobile services restored, but in the meantime they want information. And that is what RIM fundamentally failed to deliver. Users were met with radio silence across all communication channels, from Twitter to Facebook, from the help blog and to the homepage. Thousands of BlackBerry users were up in arms and as far as they were concerned, RIM didn’t seem to care.
Now, that may sound harsh, but in the age of social, battening down the hatches is no longer an option. Savvy companies are those that handle their crisis communications swiftly, openly and honestly. If people are asking questions via your community forum, you need to answer them. If they ask what’s happening via Facebook, you don’t delete their post. If they look for further information on your homepage, you don’t try and sell them another phone. You get out there and you face your public.
Tell them what you know. Tell them what you don’t know. And tell them why you can’t say. Audiences judge the effectiveness of messages on several levels – having all the answers is not necessarily one of them. Equally important is the speed of communication, as well as the honesty and openness of that communication. According to reports, during the first few hours of the BlackBerry outage, RIM failed to adhere to all three of these basic principles.
However, things seem to be getting back on track slowly. Mr Lazaridis has apologised and RIM most recently announced it will be giving away free apps to those inconvenienced last week. Let’s hope it’s not a case of too little, too late. Personally, I love my BlackBerry and I’m not the only one – even while RIM remained silent, many fans rose to the company’s defence, posting positive messages online. However, whatever your stance, you can’t help but admit it certainly has been a bad season for BlackBerrys this year.
The video is a great spot – really funny!
Great blog post, Rachel. There has been a lot of speculation over the last few days on whether people will now switch to iPhones too. My BB didn’t work for three full days and my next phone is definitely going to be an iPhone something.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/mobile-phones/8825557/Which-would-you-pick-A-BlackBerry-or-an-iPhone.html
It’s the irony of the communication business not communicating with the people that need them the most that gets me. You can’t expect the media to be kind to you if your relationship behaviour changes when they want to talk to you in a crisis.
On another note, I talked to a firm recently that was advocating that hospital staff used smart phones to receive patient updates, blood results, and the like. Even as someone who works in tech, you can see how that sort of reliance could have potentially terrible consequences, if service outages are still possible. However, perhaps if a feasible explanation of what exactly happened to cause such an outage was given, my misgivings wouldn’t be so strong.