Having recently attended a few conferences such as the Visa E-Commerce summit and “Mesh”:http://www.meshconference.com, I’ve realized the speakers I liked were ones who discussed how they dealt with disaster. So here is my turn in the confession booth – Let’s hope no one from “work”:http://www.searstravel.ca is reading.
Last year we sent an email for a St. Patrick’s Day promotion. ‘Leave the New World for the Old World’ with great travel deals to Ireland. All our i’s were dotted and t’s were crossed. We clicked send and the message went off into cyberspace.
Later the same evening I got a panicky call. *Every one of the over 50k subscribers on the list got the email 8 times.* One of those ‘oh crap’ moments in my career.
After heart palpitations and fear of black-listing by ISPs, it was damage-control time. First we stopped sending email. We then met first thing in the morning to figure out what went wrong. Prior to the meeting, my inbox already had messages from my boss and SVP asking what had happened.
At the meeting the IT guys were expecting a public execution. There was a bug in the email system that caused the problem. They apologized for the screw-up. Rather than finger-pointing we looked at fixing the situation. (Yes, I did have to restrain myself at first.)
Month: May 2006
There was not enough love for the latest CMA(Canadian Marketing Association) National Convention and Trade Show which took place last week in Montreal on One Degree. In the interest of full disclosure, I sat on the organizing committee for this amazing three-day event, and here’s my (somewhat biased) perspective:
The theme of this year’s CMA Conference was “Next:” – with the core message being, “what do marketers need to be on the look-out for.” I was very fortunate to also win a coveted speaking slot, where I let loose on the digital marketing space and all of the opportunities marketers seem to not be paying enough attention to. My presentation was called _The Brand is Flat: How Brand Democratization is Going to Change Your Business…For The Better,_ and it was followed by One Degree contributor, “Bill Sweetman”:http://www.onedegree.ca/category/bill-sweetman, who presented a stellar perspective with: _Impatience Is A Virtue: The Rise of the On Demand Consumer._
37signals (literally) wrote the book on defensive design so you’d expect them to create really great error pages. Let’s take a look one of the best examples of handling problems in a user-centric and helpful way…
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