How CNN labeled me the e-Grinch - #15 The Law of Candor

tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10118571.post-12795090045192049512008-03-25T21:49:00.001-07:002008-04-03T22:05:49.441-07:00How CNN labeled me the e-Grinch - #15 The Law of CandorWe are back to the 22 Immutable laws of Marketing by Trout and Reis. Today, it is law #15, the Law of Candor. The Law of Candor states: "When you admit a negative the prospect will give you a positive." This is one of my favorite Laws. Very seldom does anyone like to admit they have made a mistake or that they are wrong or that things aren't as good as you would like them to believe. We, as a society, have grown so cynical to the constant spinning that occurs that we embrace the law of candor as refreshing reality when we see it. Let me tell you a story. A long time ago in a in the previous decade and previous century I helped run an email hosted management company called Allegro. We managed organizations email for them and routed it to and from the Internet. We weren't an ISP, but we acted similar to one. Back then, in 1998, most everyone connected to the Internet via dialup, even corporations. Allegro had approximately 3,000 customers dialing in every day to connect their corporate email systems to the internet. We connected Exchange, Notes, GroupWise, WP Office, cc:Mail, MSMail, and others to a large pipe we had that allowed email to come in off the internet, reside in our server farm, until the email server from our customer called in and picked it up. It was easy and simple. One day, around November of 1998, someone began posting some messages on some bulletin boards that our service was failing. They complained that email was taking 30 minutes to get through out service. At first, our company was in denial. How could there be anything wrong with our service? Then, during an analysis of traffic, we discovered that our servers were almost overloaded and email was taking 30 minutes to get through. We held and emergency meeting to determine what to do and how to announce it. The decision was made by the president to immediately buy three more expensive servers and have them online before the end of the week as well as to open up even more expensive bandwidth to the Internet. That was the easy decision. The hard decision that caused a lot of arguing, was what to tell people. Did we admit that we had a problem and that we had to add more hardware. And should we say what we did to fix it. In the end, my preference prevailed. We announced in a full press release that we had encountered the problem and expanded our service with the additional hardware and bandwidth. I then took it one step further. During our analysis of the problem it was determined that the cause of our overload was the new use of attaching Christmas card files to email. Remember, this was 1998. An attachment back then of an exe file of bowling elfs, or dancing babies could bring a server to its knees, and we had 3,000 company doing it. With this information, I launched a press release stating that we would willing block any corporations email that contained Christmas card files attached for free between November of 1998 and the middle of January 1999. The idea was to let corporations know that we understood that these files cause problems and we will actually step in a block them. By taking the negative of these files clogging our system and turning it into a positive, it resulted in a large uptick in our business and it resulted in CNN to come calling. Marsha Walton, then editor of Science and Technology Week, heard about our offer and brought her camera crew to my office. We discussed the terrible things that Dancing Elves and Pornographic Snowmen can do to an email server and why it is important to keep them out of corporate customer's email systems. I got my 15 minutes of fame that year with a spot on CNN and Headline News and CNN labeled me the e-Grinch of ChristmasRichard Blisshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06711443052326619281noreply@blogger.com