Inside the world of Rob Mclean, Author

As I predicted, we are now starting to see media coverage of RIM turn to 'What's Next?" and as a result the stock is ticking upwards. Today it's up 5.11 per cent at the time of writing this entry. Examples of the media now turning towards the value aspects of RIM, as I predicted they would once they feasted on the 'Death of RIM' story, include: Will RIM's patent portfolio be its saving grace? Is there hope for RIM?  Microsoft should buy RIM as soon as possible Research In Motion: Upside Exists Among Massive Pessimism Anyway, it's not an avalanche, but the press are slowly starting to trend towards what there is left to talk about... which is what's next . From a PR perspective I'd expect this trend to continue unfolding over the course of the next month. It will probably ramp up after RIM's AGM next week and carry forward a few weeks. After that, the press will basically ignore RIM until Q2 reporting. That is unless RIM starts t...

Interesting fact... Twitter RIM has over a million followers on Twitter (@blackberry) Google has almost 5 million followers on Twitter (@google) Apple has 2.7 million followers on Twitter (@itunesmusic) Nokia has 291k followers (@nokia) RIM just had a #1inamillion campaign on Twitter celebrating the fact that they have over one million followers. Best I can tell all they did was toss a few YouTube videos up that I don't really understand, you can see them here . They all seem like really nice people, but no clue what value this has. YouTube I was fascinating to see RIM has 77k YouTube subscribers. Apple has 484k subscribers (I'm surprised Google doesn't shut their YouTube channel down) Google has 652k subscribers. Nokia has 92k subscribers. So Google clearly wins in terms of followers on both Twitter and YouTube. It will be interesting to see over time how those numbers change. Now, in recent weeks people have been comparing RIM to Nokia a lot. While...

RIM's CEO apparently went on a media blitz today, a lot of the coverage only now appearing online. He wrote a letter in the Globe and Mail which you can read here . Now in interviews you can forgive poor messaging because it's a fluid environment. But in written text there's no excuse. What stood out to me as absurd was the following: As we prepare to launch our new mobile platform, BlackBerry 10, in the first quarter of next year, we expect to empower people as never before. BlackBerry 10 will connect users not just to each other, but to the embedded systems that run constantly in the background of everyday life - from parking meters and car computers to credit card machines and ticket counters. What the hell does that mean? Yes, I've been saying they need to give details on BB10, but no one is going to believe that BB10 will connect them to parking meters. If you are going to come out with ridiculous claims like this, then you damn well better have a de...

RIM's CEO, Thorsten Heins So only a couple of days after RIM went through perhaps its worst PR disaster ever with the announcement of Q1, 5,000 lay-offs and delay of BB10, Thorsten Heins has come out publicly to try and calm shaken customers and investors. He did an interview with CBC radio which you can listen to here . Kudos to RIM on maintaining an open line of communication with the media (always a good strategy during a crisis), but I did find Heins interview a bit strange from a PR perspective. 1) CBC Radio? I found his choice of CBC Radio to be very odd. CBC radio, while a national station, has limited reach. It's not the first media outlet you'd expect RIM to engage if they are looking to calm people's concerns. Any major outlet such as the WSJ, CNBC, National Post, Globe&Mail or CNBC would have reached at least 10 times as many stakeholders. Perhaps though the decision to go with CBC Radio was sort of a beta test for their messaging strategy...

An interesting article over at blackberryos.com offers a quick (and shallow) glance at the townhall RIM had on Friday with its employees. The interesting take-aways (if they prove to be true) were: Finally RIM seems to be getting serious about its marketing. No specific details, but looks like their new CMO is actually taking an "American" style approach to marketing... which is go big or go home. BBOS speculates he may even change the name of the company as part of the overhaul.  I won't hold my breath on this one, as badly as RIM missed the boat on innovation, they were even worse when it came to marketing. Having said that, marketing remains one facet that RIM can execute on immediately.. all it takes is someone with a little bit of guts to actually pull the trigger and start the process.   The article re-iterates that BB10 folks are working 24/7. This fact seems backed up by the recent article in the Ottawa Citizen suggesting they are working more, not le...

A while ago Warren Buffett bought a whack load of local newspapers .  A lot of folks didn't understand the decision, but I always did. Local newspapers give you news you will not get from national outlets. National news you can get anywhere, most of it online for free. But local news you can only get from local news papers (with limited access online). If you want to know what is going on with a company, never ever turn to the national papers, always turn to the local papers. The local papers generally have real face-to-face relationships with the companies (and even some of their employees), whereas the national papers have generally only interacted with said companies over the phone or perhaps once or twice face-to-face. Those local relationships often result in news coverage that digs beneath the surface as to what is really going on. In light of this, the Ottawa Citizen proves my point with RIM. They had an interesting story today that states that RIM is limiting summer va...

Well I bought some shares in RIM today. I bought some at $7.54 a share on the TSX. While I'm a strong proponent of staying OUT of the stock market for the next year (perhaps even longer) given what I believe to be the possibility of a serious crash, I've made an exception in buying some RIM. If I've misjudged the bottom (a risky thing to try and do any time) I'll quickly get out should the share price fall another five per cent. Having said that, my reasons for getting in at this point are pretty simple (and mostly PR related): The 'bad news' cycle is now over. The stock has been slaughtered and basically all the dirty laundry is now wide out in the open. It's hard to imagine any negative news events over the next month or so that would receive any attention. With Q1 behind it, the discussion over financials will disappear for the next three months. Even Q2 and Q3 have had such revised expectations placed upon them, that RIM's stock price wi...