Social Episodes

It’s right there in black & white for the world to see.  I can’t deny that I made a mistake.

Yesterday afternoon we sent out an email promoting today’s webinar featuring Brian Solis.  The message went through several revisions and we missed a typo that was right there in the headline.  A mistake that we simply didn’t catch.  The title of Brian’s talk today is “Socializing your Corporate Brand”.  Our email referred to it as “Socializing your Corporate Crand“.  What can I say.  Honest mistake that slipped through the cracks.  My bad.

What I find funniest about the mistake is people’s reaction to it.  We got a bunch of messages following what I will call the “typo email” and the responses seem to fall into three buckets:

1. “No Comment”

The overwhelming majority of responses sounded something like this.  “This sounds like an awesome session.  Thanks for putting together such a great webinar schedule!  Keep me posted on additional sessions you add.”  Of all the responses we received yesterday, this was by far the most common.  To the people in this camp, rest assured our sessions are not only continuing but we have some excellent guests lined up for the coming months (beyond what is currently listed on the site)…  Stay tuned!

2. “Heads Up”

These responses were generally from people letting us know something was up in a friendly way.  For example, Patrick Rafter wrote back with “Hey Mike, looks like you have a typo in the first line.  That said, the event looks great.  Can’t wait to attend!“.  It seems the people in this bucket realized it was a mistake and figured they would bring it up to make sure we were aware.  This is likely the bucket I would fall into as I have made mistakes before and realize that, while undesirable, these things happen.

3. “Holier Than Thou”

As my mom would say “there are always a few in every group“.  To be clear, we only had a handful of responses that fell into this category. This small group of “holier than thou” people, apparently, have never made a mistake in their lives and they take great pride in developing sarcastic responses like “What the heck is a ‘Crand’?  You should proofread your emails. Very unprofessional.” or “With such a glaring typo I can’t image I would get value out of one of your sessions“.

Really?  Just so I understand, your reaction to having one letter wrong in a message is to conclude that Brian (who had noting to do with the mistake) will provide no value during his session?  To all these people all I can do is first, express our apologies for the mistake and second, respectively ask that you come off your marketing high horse and come back to reality.  Mistakes happen people.