Adding to the woes of the struggling BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion (RIM) is the fact that the company's most recent publicity stunts have fallen flat, and have drawn the people's attention for wrong reasons.

While RIM had asked the Blackberry users, towards the end of 2011, to take the Twitter route to message their "Bold" New Years' resolutions to the hashtag #BeBold, the company virtually inspired a rather caustic Twitter-storm with the Friday introduction of its so-called "Bold Team" comprising four cartoon superheros.

The cartoon foursome introduced by RIM included GoGo Girl (The Achiever), Max Stone (The Adventurer), Justin Steele (The Advocate), and Trudy ForReal (The Authentic); and it was not before long that a number of Twitterers started condemning the move.

The tweets which flooded Twitter soon after the quartet of cartoon superheros was introduced by RIM contained a horde of adjectives - like foolish, silly, dumb, inane, and moronic, among numerous others - to make a mockery of the rather inopportune move by RIM.

With all kinds of comments - ranging from polite and dismissive to blunt and downright rude - being made by the Twitterers, RIM sought to clarify its disparaged marketing stunt in a Tuesday statement which went thus: "We've noticed The BeBold Team has received a lot of attention over the last couple of days, and wanted to clarify - this infographic is just intended to be a bit of fun."