Communications lessons from the Blackberry outage

It’s somewhat ironic when a communications company proves so poor at communicating. Service for Blackberries, once the overwhelmingly dominant mobile messaging platform for businesses, has been disrupted worldwide for over three days.

Millions of mobile workers have been abruptly cut off from their most important and timely communications, some for extended periods of time. To make matters worse, however, they’ve been largely cut off from communications from the ones who can fix the problem.

No news is bad news in a crisis

When things go wrong, people want to know what’s going on. They need accurate, timely information. People will find ways to work around the challenge of the downtime, painful as it might be. But knowing what is going on, how long it’s going to take, and how to get updates as things progress is key. Blackberry has dropped the ball, big time.

Twitter to the rescue?

Like most big companies, Blackberry has a presence on social media. They have an official Twitter account, and it’s popular. Over 600,000 people are follows.

This is the sort of alternate channel that can be so helpful in a crisis. It’s a separate system that can augment customer communication in good times, and also maintain communications when the main system (Blackberry messaging) isn’t working. Perfect, right?

Wrong.

Blackberry has tweeted 13 updates in the last three days during this unprecedented level of outages. And the tweets aren’t very informative. They’re certainly not direct and candid either. Just general statements, posted hours apart, that the issue is being worked on.

Corporate-speak is not comforting

Adding insult to injury is a tweet with a link to a memo from the CIO that reads like a press release. Corporate-speak is not that comforting in a time of crisis. The problem is real for many many people, they want to know the real deal. And they want to be spoken to honestly and directly.

You can’t not listen

In today’s hyper-connected world, messages about your company will spread quickly. You need to listen to what’s being said – especially if you’ve opened up official channels in the various social media spaces.

You’ve got to engage

When you listen, you need to hear what’s being said. And you need to respond – in a professional but personal manner. Corporate speak sounds lame every day. When there’s a crisis, it sounds worse. It really does add insult to injury. Be there and be real, people can respect that.

Obvious is relative

These lessons seem obvious, particularly if you spend any time in the social media space. But there are still many companies – some as big as RIM – who just haven’t learned to master the basics. And they’ve certainly had many opportunities to work on this. After all, this is one of many historic outages for them.

Photo credit: Katie Tegtmeyer

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