Date
Jun 20
Here is an interesting Interview with Donna Tocci, the Manager of Public Relations for Kryponite during the Bic lock picking incident. Dave Taylor doesn’t throw her any hard balls and they may have been aware that the info on their locks was online – but their response certainly was not strong enough – regardless of whether blogs broke the story.
The claim is the information was posted first on an online forum, then picked up by the main stream press – and that blogs had very little to do with delivering the message. Differentiating between a blog and a forum is being nitpicky – they are both ways of effectively communicating a message online. Blogs, forums, main stream media – traditional and online, email, radio etc all did their part in shellacking Kryptonite and washing out whatever response they were able to muster. The bottom line is that Kryptonite did not use the available tools to effectively tell their side of the story.
She (maybe) makes a good point here:
“Well, the Internet moves at real time but companies sometimes can’t – not ‘won’t’, but can’t. If we’d announced what we wanted to do before we had the back end in place and couldn’t back it up, that would have been the bigger PR nightmare, right?”
However, Kryptonite still should have been announcing with all of the tools at their disposal that they were working on a solution and done some sort of spin control faster and harder than they did at the time. Tocci does concede that Kryptonite should have posted it on their (terrible) website – Would this alone been enough to wash out the din of online peer-to-peer messaging and other mainstream media accounts of the story?
All I know is that after viewing the video of their lock being picked by a ballpoint pen, I visited the Kryptonite site for more information (was the video I had seen even true?)and to see what I needed to do with my two U-locks (Was it my type of U-lock they were picking?). Unfortunately, there was no information provide on the Kryptonite website, making it very easy to assume that they didn’t care and at the time were completely out of touch with my needs as a customer.
Also, take a look at the current search results in Google for U-lock
On the upswing, once their replacement program was in place – I received the information I needed (all online) and my new locks.
