The row over the Apple iPhone 4 reception signal goes on (with many not convinced about Apple’s response); there were grumblings over iPhone 4 availability, some moaned about pricing, there’s the ongoing unhapiness over how Apps are picked/dropped from the store – and now, potentially the worst thing that can happen: reports are coming in that their iTunes store accounts have been hacked and they’ve bought stuff they never ordered, specifically copright-breaking scans of a manga.

Can Apple’s PR stick to the usual head-in-the-sand tactic for this one?

In the US iTunes store features 40 out of the top 50 apps appear to be by the same developer, Thuat Nguyen. Now these apps are of someone else’s manga comics, scanned in and being passed off as Thuat Nguyen having the copyright.

Now, there’s an issue there alone but on top of that, numerous people are complaining that their accounts have been hacked and used to buy Thuat Nguyen apps.

Now it’s possible that they are all lying. They’ve all bought the stuff, seen that it’s junk and are crying foul. Or the accounts have been hacked. Sadly, option 2 is looking the more likely.

This becomes a bigger issue when you consider that Steve Jobs was recently boasting about how the iTunes Store – with 155million accounts – is the world’s biggest store. That’s a lot of potentially hackable accounts and credit card details.

And as always, no one from Apple seems to be out on the internet, saying that they’ll look into this issue. This has shades of Amazon all over it.

PR disasters don’t happen Monday-Friday, 9-5pm

Just like Amazon, this is a weekend PR incident, but we are long past the days of only monitoring and responding during normal office hours. And here’s the next problem: this is an issue that’s being complained about via social media. Apple has a terrible social media presence.

Apple’s Social Media Dichotomy and the opportunity for bad press

I use this one at presentations all the times: name one of the least social media friendly companies out there. The answer’s Apple. Anything it has done for Facebook/Twitter is to sell the iTunes store. There’s no Apple inhouse blogs, no developer blogs or twitter streams, no official podcasts.

It’s very ironic, but it also presents a PR problem here. What’s to stop someone going online right now and setting up a bunch of official looking streams and putting stuff out there? They could spoof like the BP Twitter stream or they could post something more straight, that may get used by journalists too time-pushed to see how official the material is.

What Apple should do via PR, social media to head off PR crisis

• There should be statements going out to every site mentioning the story
• There should be an official line somewhere, even if it is just a holding statement saying ‘we’re looking into it’
• Once the issue is sorted, people need to be told what happened and reassured that it won’t happen again
• Sort out people taking the copyrighted work of others and passing it off as their own
• Long-term: changes made so that these issues are monitored at weekends to prevent a repeat.

Will Apple do anything? Does Apple care?

Ultimately, it may not bother. It may just fix the issue on the hush, but as bad press builds up, Apple may find people don’t want their products, they lose their shine – and that’s bad enough in a normal consumer company but Apple is subtly trying to go back upmarket with the latest pricing and with premium products people expect premium service and image, so over time the goodwill will be eroded and then when Apple finds itself less popular than it is today then it’s lost a lot of people it may have kept otherwise – all because of bad PR and bad customer service.

Update

It seems that Apple has been proactive in looking into this with none other than Senior VP Philip Schiller contacting people – now that’s good PR.

Anyway, some comprehensive links on the updated issue can be found at:

http://www.macrumors.com/2010/07/04/reports-of-app-store-hacked-greatly-exaggerated/

http://www.alexbrie.com/archives/205

http://www.alexbrie.com/archives/215