As anyone with a Blackberry phone will know, and much to the amusement of iPhone and Android owners, last week saw tens of millions of users lose their messaging, internet and email services – twice.

Blackberry themselves were condemned for the outages, with users flocking to social media sites to vent their frustrations.  However, the outbursts were not only aimed at the service’s downtime, but were also related to the lack of communication from Blackberry themselves.

When asked whether he thought Blackberry’s communication was good enough during the outages, Managing Director Stephen Bates stated that they “didn’t spend enough time thinking about communication”.  Considering the purpose of their products is to help people communicate you have to love the irony.

Lack of communication during a crisis, however, isn’t anything new.  A classic example occurred during the 2010 BP oil spill.  During the cleanup operation, BP gave very few updates of their progress, and some photos they did release of their efforts were found to be Photoshopped.

In response, a fake Twitter account was created under the BP moniker, providing extensive and hilarious updates throughout the spill.  As a result, the handle gained over five times as many followers as the official page, a statistic which must have deeply saddened BP America’s Head of Communications.

The moral of these stories can be summarised pretty easily.  With mass communication inevitable with the advent of social media, brands need to either play an immediate and active damage limitation role in a crisis, or be prepared to deal with the aftermath of letting others do the talking for them.

However, Blackberry and BP would probably rather think of their PR at the times in the the following way: