My friends at FeedBurner ran into a bit of a problem yesterday. An employee, with the best of intentions created an email campaign by gathering email addresses from blogs and sending messages to the owners of those blogs about their business (related to blogging). The messages were sent to about 90 people, and of course, it did not take long for people to start complaining, and bloggers to gather on the warpath BlogHerald published about it, and it rapidly appeared in other places too.
Now I know the folks at Feedburner. Good folks, great company, great product. The last thing in the world they would ever condone as a company is taking an unethical marketing approach, and sending out Spam. The reality is however, that this can happen to any company. Employees don't always know what email marketing laws are, and even if they do, their best intentions may take over, and not even think that they might be sending out a message that would be considered Spam. Well here is a quick lesson in damage control.
Dick Costello, FeedBurner's CEO was immediately on the case. The first thing he did is admit they made a mistake. He posted the admission on their blog , and also commented about it on the blogs where he found it mentioned. The bottom line is by today, the blogosphere seems to have calmed down, and what could have been a major word of mouth disaster was difused with something very simple - honestly admitting a mistake. Hats off to the folks at FeedBurner for addressing this issue in such a professional manner. There is a lesson in this for all of us.
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