Experts question how RIM handled communications during outages
BlackBerry services returned to normal Thursday after four days of global outages, but the maker of the popular smartphone faces a new set of challenges as it tries to clean up a public relations headache.
Research In Motion‘s two co-CEOs – Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie – emerged from more than three days of silence to answer questions and apologize again about the biggest outage in the Canadian company’s history.
As the troubles wore on this week, RIM offered only a few updates on what was happening while a growing number of BlackBerry users turned to their Facebook and Twitter accounts to express their frustrations.
The Waterloo, Ont.-based company has about 70 million BlackBerry subscribers around the world, and while the technical glitches did not affect everyone, the word of discontent spread fast.
RIM has now stepped into territory where many other major companies have tread in recent years, commonly known as “crisis management” in the public relations industry. The period is caused by an event, or series of events, that could potentially prove disastrous to the organization, if fumbled.
Co-CEO Balsillie defended RIM’s decision to wait until the problems were nearly fixed before coming out publicly in a bigger way. He said the company will now turn its attention to addressing BlackBerry users.
“It’s a priority, but I do want to say our priority right up until this moment was making sure the system was up and running and operating globally,” Balsillie said on a conference call with Lazaridis, a relatively rare appearance of both executives together.
That attitude may have worked in the past, but with the rise of social media in recent years, the urgency of major companies addressing their customer’s concerns has reached a new level, say some observers.
“It’s important for brands to be perceived as being responsible and perceived as if they care very much about the brand community,” said Sidneyeve Matrix, a professor of media and mass communications at Queens University in Kingston, Ont.
“The damage that can be done to the brand is something worth worrying about.”
In Thursday’s conference call, RIM explained that the widespread outage was caused by technical glitches linked to a backup switch that did not function as tested, causing a large backlog of emails and texts.
Outages started in Europe, then spread to the Middle East, Africa and hit Canada on Wednesday. Parts of South America, as well as Asian markets including Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore and India, were also affected.
Lazaridis said on Thursday that he wanted to apologize to BlackBerry customers.
“All the services are back up globally,” he said.
“We are and will take every action feasible to address this quickly, efficiently and to minimize the risk of something of this magnitude happening again. We’re committed to restoring the trust that we’ve worked so hard to earn over the years.”
Technology analyst Alkesh Shah said RIM has a PR challenge on its hands and doesn’t seem to understand consumer marketing.
“As soon as you know there’s a problem, come out and say, ‘We have a problem and we’re working on it and it will be fixed soon,'” said Shah of New York-based Evercore Partners.
“You let the consumers know you are completely focused on this and they’re the most important thing in the world.”
Instead, RIM appeared to want to fix the problem first and then tell consumers it was repaired, Shah suggested.
Whether the approach used by RIM will ultimately hurt the company’s brand remains to be seen, but major crises have enveloped many major companies, with mixed results.
Pat McHugh, senior portfolio manger at Manulife Asset Management, said RIM’s CEOs should have been out front from Day One.
“We should have seen the co-CEO’s right at the very beginning talking, instead of some head of technology – whoever that guy was.”
RIM sent out its chief technology officer David Yach to explain the problem on Wednesday, the third day when the outages went global. It wasn’t until the outage was basically resolved on Thursday when Lazaradis went on YouTube to give an update.
The scripted video, in which Lazaridis spoke directly to the camera while wearing a black polo shirt emblazoned with the BlackBerry logo, was the first instance in which one of the company’s co-CEOs appeared publicly to address the outage.
The two executives then quickly scheduled a conference call that was accessible to both the media and the public through the company’s website.
