Beeb sends technology poster child into a spin

Today, the BBC website features an interesting piece on voice to text pioneer SpinVox, revealing the results of an investigation into the company’s privacy standards, technology and finances.

Whilst the story itself is a good read, it is perhaps not the exposé that it first appears and instead raises questions about how a company that was once (and still very much is) a media darling seems to have been set up for an extremely public fall.

SpinVox is something of a dotcom success story, launching in a blaze of publicity in 2004 under the stewardship of no-nonsense CEO Christina Domecq. The idea was a simple one. Change voice messages into text and solvean existing and everyday problem – something that technology triumphs at doing time and time again. It caught the imagination of press and consumers alike. Even the failings of the Voice Message Conversion System have been celebrated via the Twitter hashtag spinvoxchangedmyname.

But, as a wise man once said, what goes up must come down and today’s news seems to be the latest in a series of falls for SpinVox. In isolation, this story wouldn’t represent anything more than a pretty large headache for the PR team. However, when added to last week’s news that it had asked staff to take part or all of their July and August pay in the form of share options and the unfortunate timing of being locked out of one if its London data centres in a dispute over payment, crisis teams are no doubt being gathered pretty rapidly.

The company attributes some of these issues to growing pains – it has over 100 million customers around the world and is now operating profitably – but how it communicates now will be pivotal to the company’s future. Customer loyalty is hard to obtain, assuring and retaining 100 million disillusioned customers is an awfully big challenge. Expect to see an online led charm offensive over the coming days, weeks and months – it already seems to have started on Twitter, with many users dismissing the BBC’s article as overly sensationalist.

Personally speaking, I hope SpinVox can ride out the storm. The company is a great example of how a highly effective communications strategy can turn a good idea into a major technology champion for the UK to be proud of.

Tags: bbc, consumer technology, pr, social media, twitter

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 23rd, 2009 at 3:23 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.