Research In Motion (RIM) has given us yet another example of bad crisis management. RIM “remained largely quiet” during an outage that left an estimated five million users of the popular BlackBerry wireless email device without service. As all crisis managers know, a lack of immediate response leads to a vacuum which is almost always filled with negative perception and commentary. The company was sharply criticized for not immediately responding to the public.
For example, let’s look at the Wall Street Journal coverage: Black Berry User Stew in Wake of Outage
- “an outage that left an estimated five million users of the popular BlackBerry wireless email device without service angering some customers and fueling speculation about what may have been at the root of the failure.”
- “Corporate BlackBerry users said they found the company’s silence puzzling, given the unprecedented scope of the outage”
The article also quoted some key customers who were very unhappy. This is extremely hurtful to the company and its sales force in particular, and makes an already negative article that much more damaging:
- “I find their reluctance to discuss the event a bit baffling — it undermines their credibility,” said John Halamka, chief information officer for Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, who oversees 270 BlackBerry users at Beth Israel and 200 more at Harvard Medical School. All were affected by the outage for eight hours or more, he said.
- Eugene Stein, chief technology officer at the law firm White & Case LLP, which has about 1,900 BlackBerry users, concurred with that assessment. “They’re very quiet on this,” said Mr. Stein who said he has kept up with the situation through media reports and was eager to determine whether the failure is likely to be repeated.
When criticized for not issuing a statement, “a Research In Motion spokeswoman said that determining the full root causes of the outage would take more time.”
This is the number one mistake made in crisis management. RIM should have immediately issued a statement, followed by updates, which would have helped control the message and mitigate negative commentary.
Ultimately, RIM shares fell $1.88, or 1.4%, to $132.49.
Rutgers Women’s basketball/Imus
The Rutgers Women’s basketball team also had an opportunity to turn around and better control a hurtful message, but instead the team met with Don Imus and issued a statement addressing race relations. This is disappointing, they had an opportunity to talk about their accomplishments as a team and steer away from the controversy , but instead fell right into the debate trap started by Imus, Al Sharpton, and others. Thus the story remained about Imus’ racial remarks, and not about the unbelievable accomplishments of the team.
The crisis management principles remain the same, yet we continue to see organizations make the same classic blunders. I suspect we’ll continue to see more.