Three’s 3G Network Down – PR Fail

I woke up this morning to find my 3G on my iPad dead. I use 3. What would anybody do if something like this happens? No, not call the customer support – look on the web! (Of course if they have alternative means of accessing it, which luckily I have)

Guess what – your source of choice for this kind of information is Twitter. Google News has proved totally useless for this case. Apparently I was not the only one searching for the info:

Screen Shot 2013-06-04 at 10.30.49

 

Yet, Google News is serving up an old story related to 3 in Australia which isn’t even on the news site appearing in the SERPs any more!

Screen Shot 2013-06-04 at 10.23.17

 

The story itself looks really reassuring to the UK 3 customers in the light of today’s problem. You’d think Three itself should have come up with some sort of a statement on their site – but all I could locate was this page:

Screen Shot 2013-06-04 at 10.32.46
PR fail… Ugh. Why not have some status report blog or something, you are a mobile service provider, things like this tend to happen, ok they may not and should not happen every day but this is modern day customer relations… But it looks like Sky is the only one that has a story covering this at the moment.

When I looked at Twitter in the meantime, there were plenty of tweets from unhappy customers but there was also the aforementioned Sky News story:

Screen Shot 2013-06-04 at 10.28.31

 

As a sidenote, it’s worth noting an unrelated promoted tweet – I guess it must be difficult targeting breaking news with ads, definitely something Twitter needs to work on much more since they ARE indeed a source to go to for breaking news.

The moral of the story: fails will happen if you’re a brand, no brand is insured against fails. It’s how you handle them that makes all the difference. The problem will get fixed and go away but what will people see searching for your brand name and what message does it pass? In this case, nothing 3 actually controls.

Oh and my 3G seems to be back now.


Posted

in

by

Tags: