Last month, I slammed Infusionsoft when they started spamming me with email after I had downloaded an eBook from their website.
The very next day, CEO of Infusionsoft Clate Mask apologized via comments to that blog post. Here was his comment:
“Gopal–very fair point. We should have had the language on there that communicates we will send follow-up messages when you hit submit. My bad. We will change that. I complete agree with you about permission marketing. And I admit that sometimes we get going too fast and make mistakes that result in unwanted messages. But believe me: we do want to send value, build a relationship and become a trusted advisor to folks who want to know how to build their businesses more quickly and effectively. Thanks for your comment. It will cause me to examine things and see if we’ve been too heavy on promotion and light on valuable content to our prospects. BTW, I really appreciate your perspectives and am a little embarassed to be called out by you.”
I was impressed – a CEO was reading what was being said about his company on my blog and he took the time to admit the mistake, apologize and promise that the issue will be fixed. However, I was not going to be convinced until I saw that changes were made.
I went to their website last week to see if anything had changed and nothing had. Then I received another comment from Clate last night about this same issue.
Hi Gopal, I just want to thank you for your “criticism” a few weeks ago about our opt-in and follow-up marketing practices. Your post resulted in a meeting between me and our marketing director. We have already changed a couple of things in order to be more transparent to folks who opt in to my eBook and various white papers. And we are revising some other things we are doing–toning down the frequency of communications, etc. As our company has grown, I think we have gone a little overboard with the amount and frequency of email communications we send. Again, thanks for the nudge in a better direction.
Clate had kept his word, made the easy fix and is now working on fixing his messaging problem.
Think about it – how many CEOs or others in companies are paying attention to what is being said about their products/companies in the social media, how many of them take the time to correspond with this new media, admit that a mistake has been made and then make sure it gets fixed.
I have to applaud Clate for doing this. All of us make mistakes, what takes effort is the willingness to admit that it was wrong and then take the time to fix it. I am not a customer of InfusionSoft, but people who could be their customers may be reading my blog.
Clate – you are way ahead of your CEO peers. I have to say I am impressed.
Folks, if your organization is not paying attention to social media, you are digging a big hole for yourselves. Your existence is threatened and you should be worried.
Software Product Manager by Gopal Shenoy 
Gopal, this is a great example of the power of social media. I read about your efforts to call out the spamming and had my doubts you’d get a response. It’s great to see that Clate saw and accepted his errors and was willing to do something about it. Congrats Clate!
It’s great to see how the honest and effective use of social media is changing the business world. Thanks for sharing. -Michael
Gopal.. great perspective. I couldn’t agree more. I think social media is so important for spreading the word/messaging of a company. I think it is the responsibility of each company to create a consistent concise message and spread the “word” into as many “medias” as possible. Meaning, today there is no standard way to touch everyone.
Some people are into blogs, forums, tweeter, myspace, youtube, facebook, websites, google, emails whatever. The point is that everyone retains information differently.
Kudos to you for professionally calling out the folks above. But more importantly, they are listening.