The Colorado Rockies had an amazing run through the Major League Baseball playoffs before falling in four consecutive games to the Boston Red Sox in the World Series.  What wasn’t so amazing was the public relations mess that the team created in selling tickets to the World Series games that were to be hosted in Denver.  The team made a decision to sell the tickets on-line.  For two consecutive days, the Rockies mumbled, bumbled, fumbled and stumbled their way through a ticket selling process that tried the patience of any fan looking to buy a ticket over the internet.  8.5 million hits to the Rockies website in the first 90 minutes of ticket selling on Day One brought the ticket selling apparatus to its knees.  The Rockies tried again the next day and did sell all of its allotment of tickets, but not before further angering fans and committing several public relations offenses.

You don’t have a crisis unless you create victims and the Rockies managed to create thousands of victims all across Colorado.  For those who attempted to buy from home or work, thousands of hours of productivity were lost as people sat at their computers and watched the screens go blank as they attempted to buy tickets.  This was true the first day and on the second day of ticket sales.  For anyone living in Colorado, if you didn’t experience it yourself, you likely knew at least ten people who were shut out by the computer snafu.  (more…)