Please excuse the altering fonts, we're not sure why it posted this way. Thanks, Jackie & Pei

1. Case Study: RIM’s poor Social Media response to Blackberry outages of October 2011
Jackie Titolo, Pei Wang
Research In Motion (RIM), a global leader in wireless innovation, revolutionized the
mobile industry with the introduction of the BlackBerry® solution in 1999. It powers millions of
BlackBerry users around the world across several continents
On Monday October 10, 2011, RIM‟s U.K. data center experienced server problems,
leaving many customers in the dark with prolonged interruptions of their messaging service –
mainly with BBM, web browsing and email capabilities. Unsatisfied users immediately took to
social media – particularly Twitter – to express frustrations, which resulted in the creation of the
DearBlackBerry trending topic.
Almost as shocking as the incident itself, was the lack of communication through social
media that RIM, a company that grew its reputation by being at the forefront of technology and
communication, offered the media and its affected customers in North America, Europe, Africa
and Asia. Worsening the situation for RIM and BlackBerry was the release of Apple‟s iPhone
4S the same week and the growing popularity of Android smart phones that had been luring
away BlackBerry users for several months.
Many subscribers were without services for 3 days, which combined with RIM‟s tight lip
and only 2 brief tweets over those 3 days, allowed the problems publicized by users to be
significantly inflated since not all users experienced all problems. As consumer goods
companies are the most likely to experience a social media crisis, generally triggered by a public
dissatisfaction with a product, it was key for RIM to assure users they were working on
alleviating the problem and reiterating their gratitude for their customers‟ loyal business. The

2. public was already aware of the problem so ignoring it simply provided individuals a platform to
„fill in the blank‟ as to what they believed the problem was. As a result, rumors that BlackBerry
was up for sale and RIM was expected to break up swirled across the Internet. Beyond these
inconveniences, the service outage affected U.S. federal agencies, including the Federal Reserve
and the U.S. Treasury, taking RIM‟s silence beyond irresponsible and into dangerous.
BlackBerry co-CEO Mike Lazaridis released a public apology video only after the glitch
was cleared, which did little to bridge the gap RIM put between itself and its customers. Nor did
the company make an immediate attempt to make amends by offering the 40 million affected
BlackBerry subscribers a peace offering, like free apps or a discount on their next bill.
Blackberry‟s UK website, where the problem originated, did not so much as post a message
addressing the situation and 2 days into the crisis, the BlackBerry Help Blog had not been
updated in 4 days. BlackBerry help forums also went neglected, while questions and comments
posted to FaceBook were not only ignored, but often blocked and removed.
Tens of thousands of tweets were addressed to BlackBerry‟s multiple handles but those
seeking answers had to settle for “@UK_BlackBerry Message delays were caused by a core
switch failure in RIM‟s infrastructure. Sincerely sorry but now being resolved”, which came over
24 hours into the crisis. The situation deeply affected the value of RIM‟s stock and has
undoubtedly affected sales on other products, like tablets. In not recognizing its customers
intelligence and desire for concrete information, RIM ironically emerged as one of 2011‟s worst
examples of modern communication.