Today’s hot topic has been the fact that the Vodafone network for much of the West of the country has been affected by an outage. Early on little was known until a news story broke about their datacenter being the subject of a break-in. And now, at midday there is still nothing much evident on their site, the forum remains lacking any updates since an initial post at 9:45am.
Even if there has been no news since then the company are missing a major trick in keeping quiet publicly about the outage. Or are they?
In this modern, enlightened, but more importantly connected world we all have our say, cling to the premise that our 15 mins will come, Twitter after all, is a place for us to tell others what we think and they’ve even cunningly coined (or redeployed) the concept of “trending” which is such a powerful thing.
Here, take a look at a screen grab of the google results for “vodafone” as of a couple of minutes ago.
Notice how much the article about the break-in features? It’s become part of the social media landscape for the day now. Depending on where and what you believe the break-in occurred at some point over the weekend – shouldn’t someone, by now, have put together a statement, no matter how brief, and slapped it on the companies home page?
We have, by definition of what we do as a company, rules placed upon us to alert in the case of a disaster-level event, this was bought sharply into focus recently when an emergency exercise at Lands End Airport occurred on the same day as the tragic crash at Cork. In that scenario, as with Manx2, we would have had to issue something as quickly as was possible – and we would do our level best to control the information passed about in social media by getting the message out early and making sure it’s clear.
But a sizeable chunk of one of the UKs largest mobile providers losing service isn’t an event on the same scale is it? No one was hurt?
Tragically in today’s world information is everything, as we sit here contracts could be lost, opportunities missed, chances wasted, just because of an outage. It’s not a tragedy in the sense of a terrible loss of life, but it is a significant issue, so how come they can’t respond?
A statement, no matter how brief, would be sufficient, the tide of information flow would carry it around for you, we all know how the press reports in varying shades, so what if the information is incomplete or confusing, just be popping your head up and saying something is a start.
Massive opportunity for damage limitation missed by Vodafone there methinks. Time to rethink the PR strategy!
UPDATE:
There you go, now that wasn’t hard was it?
We’d like to apologise to customers who are currently experiencing a loss of voice, text and internet services.
This is due to equipment damage at one of our technical facilities after a break-in last night. We’re working to restore everything to normal as soon as possible.
(Message last updated 28 Feb 11:45am)
Register Report – http://reg.cx/1N0c
BBC Report – http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12595681
Support Forum – http://bit.ly/fkUYmM