Blackberry Blacks Out

Every week when I am researching current public relations news, I always tend to stumble across a new communications crisis. I find this interesting considering there are thousands of real examples to learn from; blogs about what to do or what not to do during a crisis; books about how to create and implement a crisis communications plan; and other numerous sources to help before, during and after these unfortunate situations.

Just in the past month there have been a handful of well-known companies that made huge communications mistakes including Netflix, Bank of America and the most recent failure, Blackberry.

Last week in Europe, BlackBerry services experienced an internal technical glitch causing an outage. The outage then spread to Africa, the Middle East and hit the U.S. three days after the initial glitch.

The Canadian-based company, Research in Motion (RIM), blamed the issue on a backlog of messages. According to The Wall Street Journal, it was a “failed switch and an inoperable backup.”

Four days after the initial outage, the service returned to normal for users around the globe.

RIM responded to this crisis by creating a link on their webpage that directed users straight to service updates and an apology video by the RIM CEO Mike Lazaridis. These updates might include apologies, but there were few details on when the glitches would be fixed. They also used technical jargon which means little or nothing to most people.  

The company used Twitter to update followers in different languages to reach their users around the world experiencing the outage. The issue with their tweets is that they were not timely about reaching out to customers when the glitch occurred on Monday. They also lied to users when they promised that the issue was fixed when it actually was not fixed.

For the second-quarter, BlackBerry  reported a 59 percent drop in profits and a year-over-year decline in product shipments. This outage was a major crisis for the company and they only helped damage their brand (and future) by adding horrible communications in the mix.

There are two main issues that stood out to me in this particular crisis, including the lack of being completely honest and timely.

In all of my public relations courses we learn about the most basic concept of PR ethics: always tell the truth. It’s simple. If you aren’t certain about a fact, then be honest that you’re unsure about it. Inform your audience that you will get back to them when you are 100 percent sure of the whole truth, but be timely with your response.

Blackberry stating that the issue was fixed when it actually took an extra three days angered consumers even more. I can’t say that users would have been thrilled to know that their phones would be down for that long in advance, but at least the company would have been honest in their communications.

Timing is also a major issue when dealing with a crisis. Blackberry did not get in contact with their users in a timely matter. If and when a crisis happens, a company should focus on the issue first to get through it in order to salvage their image.

Since Blackberry is a technologically savvy company that provides instant communications to customers globally, I find it interesting that their communications skills need some work.