RIMS PR Failure
On Monday October 10th 2011 RIM’s software had a glitch causing major chaos to BlackBerry users worldwide. This glitch disabled all BBM ability and most of the other data services such as:
- Web Browsing
- Reception
Not only was this glitch a problem, but RIM's PR department didn’t do much when the public needed answers. It took until the fourth day for RIM to give a statement on what was happening. When they finally did give their statement they claimed that there was nothing they could tell the public and had no estimated time for this glitch to be fixed.
From a PR perspective, as soon as this situation happened, there should have been a statement to the media explaining what was happening and comforting them in the process of fixing the situation. Instead they hid in the shadows for 3 days and left everyone hanging.
On the fourth day they did come out with a video apology on youtube. The RIM CO-founder claimed that they are sorry for the inconvenience but they cannot give a real time line of when this situation will be fixed. BlackBerry also claimed that they are not sure about what is even causing the problems.
With over 600,000 followers on twitter, they tweeted about this situation no more then 15 times. With that many followers it seems as though 15 tweets did not do its justice.
Once the problem was fixed, the PR department did step up and offered 100$ worth of free applications for all BlackBerry users that were effected by this glitch. Although this is a good way to make consumers happy again, they did not focus on the situation at hand.
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