Smack My Pitch Up
About this blog...The corporate PR world can be dull - no really. Come ride with me as we take a weekly sideways glance at the world of PR in the lofty world of big business, from someone who has been there, done that, and was mostly fired.
No more Blackberry crumble as US government plans new RIM job
President Obama reading Andy Barr's latest column on his BlackberryPutting the boot into a company is far easier than saying something nice, so today I am going to buck the PR trend and actually take the hard slog and be nice.
Blackberry Research in Motion (RIM), I salute you! The Kenny Powers of mobile phones, ie the turnaround of the decade!
I for one thought Blackberry as a brand was going to die this year. I was so convinced that when a Chinese government delegation decided to descend upon Yeti Towers for a talk about crisis communications (I don’t know why they chose us either), I cited Blackberry as being one of the biggest PRFail companies of the last few years.
Back to being nice though - come on, stick with it - and despite one corporate world financial analyst describing the Blackberry share price being in a “death spiral”, it looks like them uber-intelligent-phone-makers are back.
This week a tiny little story fell gracefully onto Reuters that got analysts revising their forecasts upwards and putting a spring back into Blackberry’s step.
That story: a US government department is about to reverse its decision to sack off Blackberry phones for iPhones and is going to start trials to begin using them again.
This is the biggest Christmas comeback since Mary’s virginity (wink wink, keeping it topical).
There is still a massive way to go for Blackberry before it returns to the good old days.
Remember when Barack Obama was actually proud enough to shout that he had one, and when kids were able to fast and effectively plan riots using the RIM “ream” messenger service that also got them blanket coverage (and no doubt increased handset sales from the yoof sector)?
Joking aside, the company is now awash with coverage about this news and its share price is at the highest recovery price it has reached since the bad old network outage days.
If the company pulls this off the public relations team really needs to enter its current campaign into every award going. They deserve it.
Don’t forget, if you work in corporate PR and fancy sharing some anonymous gossip, hit me up on @10Yetis on Twitter (yes, this is a shameless plug of my Twitter account).
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Yes I agree with you, PR was really lacking as far as RIM/BlackBerry. Kind of reminded me of the days when Sony was no longer the only decent TV set around, yet they still seemed happy to rely big time on the loyal and existing customer base rather than continue to plug the products. Companies need to keep advertising and not to just the already converted. How many have heard of the BlackBerry Music Gateway, an awesome bit of kit which is even device agnostic, yet it seems in the UK, as far as I can tell, to not have had much of a look in. And yes the "uber-intelligent-phone-makers" are now back, Mobile companies seemed as of late to be quite happy to go with the flow but what is so great about RIM and what they have done with BB10 is to do some real innovation to the whole mobile system. This is what technology should be about else we end up in a very stagnant world with customers paying hard earned cash for just minor cosmetic changes rather than innovative features that actually make a difference. Having had an opportunity to use the BB10 Alpha devices, I can see why the other mobile companies are taking note and their loyal fans constantly trying every which way to kick BlackBerry down, it's a sad fact of human nature to want to justify your own purchasing decision rather than simply being happy it seems. It's great being different in my opinion, makes for a far better world. Overall it's going to be good for the end users and January the 30th is going to be really interesting that's for sure.
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