Putting 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).