Apologize when you screw up

Day 109 – Yes, I know. My last blog post was a little over the top. I shouldn’t be calling Seth Miller a pathetic loser. I get it. But that’s the point I was making.

Becoming a better person is progress. It doesn’t just happen overnight. I happens through lots of failed attempts.

I try to squash my anger and I’ve come a very long way. I probably would have ignored Seth if he were just attacking me, but seeing him attack my staff really pushed me over the edge.

Let me tell you about my staff for a second because this week is Thanksgiving and they are some of the people I am most thankful for in my life.

My staff drives me absolutely nuts, but I love each of them. They screw up at times, but that’s to be expected in our line of work.

People expect perfection when they hire us. But when it comes to the Internet, people also expect things to happen immediately. Social networking is about firing as fast as you can and as often as you can.

Unlike TV ads and mail pieces, emails and social messages often do not go through a tedious approval process. Mistakes happen. Words are misspelled. Disclaimers get left off.

We obviously try to minimize mistakes and we have procedures in place to do so, but that isn’t going to completely eliminate them.

You can have it too ways – perfect or fast. It is extremely difficult to make items both perfect AND fast. We do make things both perfect and fast more often than not, but that doesn’t happen 100% of the time.

Last week we left off a disclaimer on an email. The client even approved the email, but it was still our fault.

Friends at different web firms have tweeted one client’s message from another client’s twitter handle, sent an email from one client on another client’s email template and posted one client’s press release on another client’s website.

A few months back I even read about the employee of a huge corporate social media firm accidentally dropping an F-bomb through Chrysler’s twitter handle instead of her own. That’s what happens when you tweet at a red light. And its also what happens when clients expect messages to go out immediately and around the clock. Why else would this employee have Chrysler’s twitter handle on their iPhone?

My employees are some of the hardest working, most creative, most intelligent and most eager people I know. I would rather have those traits than a bunch of lazy, non-creative, and non-eager people who never screw up. If anything, we only screw up when we are trying too hard.

We have never dropped F-bombs on clients’ Twitter handles or mistakenly sent out messages from one client under another client’s name, but I can see where those things easily happen. Heck, we did forget to hit record on a pretty awesome episode of Pub Politics. And remember, I apologized to all you guys repeatedly.

Here are my golden rules about screwing up:

1. Learn from other people’s screw-ups. For example, after seeing the Chrysler mistake, I know use a different iPhone Twitter client for my personal account and my client accounts.
2. Forget finger pointing and fix the problem immediately.
3. Upon fixing the problem, admit the mistake.
4. Apologize. Apologize again. Apologize a third time.
5. Don’t just learn from your screw-up, but also implement strategies to ensure it never happens again.

- Wesley Donehue