Perez Hilton Rants About Sidekicks

The past week has proven to be maddening if not debilitating for many T Mobile customers with Sidekicks.  Due to a system failure by Microsoft, whose Danger subsidiary powers the Sidekick service, subscribers lost everything: contacts, photos, calendars, and tasks.  In other words, it was the worst nightmare of every business executive, teenage girl, and technologically-savvy grandmother.

With the Sidekick, one of T Mobile’s most popular phones among its younger customer base, it was only a matter of time until the outage became a trending topic on Twitter.  Given how dependent young people are on their phones, the talk spared no remorse with hashtags including #Tmobilesux and #Tmobilestillsux.  I’ll spare you the more volatile ones.

Users’ frustration was not limited to Twitter though, as shown by Facebook statuses expressing their rage, and celebrity blogger Perez Hilton rallying his leaders to tweet about it and cancel their subscriptions.  Comments ranged from T Mobile customers vowing to never purchase anything from the company again to releasing T Mobile executives’ personal phone numbers to call and complain.

It was a perfect example of how social websites can generate negative buzz, and a great reminder just how fast negative press can grow.  However, T Mobile isn’t the only victim of a crisis that was exacerbated by the social media world.  Remember the horrifying footage of Domino’s workers soiling food orders that was released on YouTube this past summer?  Viewers witnessed workers tampering with take-out orders in blatant violation of health code rules. The company fired the starring employees and issued an apology, but I know that I will never eat there again.  How many other customers did Domino’s lose after viewing the disgusting video?

As of yesterday, Mircrosoft’s Premium Mobile Experiences Vice President Roz Ho issued a statement on the T Mobile website reporting that T Mobile and Danger “have recovered most, if not all, customer data.”  And while that comes as a relief to most people who suffered from data loss for a week, it also taught some painful lessons:

1. Back up your personal data.  In this case, most customers lost their data for a week, but next time it could be forever.  As far as we have come technologically, it’s no guarantee that something like this won’t happen again.  Take time to record important information about your professional and personal contacts.
2. It’s important for companies to have a strong crisis management plan in place when disasters, such as the T Mobile example, hit the press and social websites.  How should your company deal with negative tweets?  What preventative actions are there in place so that you can effectively answer outraged customers’ questions?  Is there any way to put a positive spin on the situation?

It’s hard to know how T Mobile will recover from this.  With the economy the way it is, companies are already having a difficult time making their numbers.  Add angry customers to the mix, and it might just be their worst nightmare.