Email Bog-ups
By Susan Fenton of F Words
Do you know that hot-and-cold-all-over feeling you get when you make a gigantic balls-up by inadvertently sending an email to an inappropriate person?
I had one this week when joining the professionals’ networking site LinkedIn.
When I registered, the site asked if I’d like to connect with anyone from my email address book. I clicked on the names of four people who, the site indicated, were already LinkedIn members - all fellow journalists of one sort or another - and pressed go.
The site promptly emailed EVERYONE in my address book. I’d registered using a Hotmail address I use only rarely and then only for purposes of registering with online retailers, market research companies, networking sites and the like - and for giving an anonymous address to the sort of strangers you quite like but aren’t too sure about.
The idea is that my work email box won‘t be filled with the spam that invariably results from such transactions, and the interesting strangers won‘t be able to track me down.
Luckily, it contains only about 50 addresses - most of which are the likes of Tesco.com, tripadvisor.com and thetrainline.com, who I’m not sure will be terribly eager to grasp the chance to join me in professional networking.
What made my toes curl in embarrassment was the fact that among the 50 addresses are those of several persons of the opposite persuasion who I met briefly when internet dating some years ago.
I’d never bothered to delete their addresses after deciding I didn’t wish to pursue the friendships. I didn’t realise I needed to delete their addresses - I didn’t realise that giving permission for LinkedIn to access my address book would mean them randomly contacting everyone I’ve ever had a bad date with, to tell them I’d love to talk to them again.
So a word of warning, don’t let these sites email your contacts on your behalf - if you want to ‘invite’ anyone to your network, invite them yourself.
I was briefly cheered up the day after that debacle by hearing about the experience of a friend who runs a PR consultancy not a million miles from Reigate.
She’s been successfully (until now) juggling things so that neither of her two main clients, who are acrimonious competitors, realise that she’s representing both of them. But during a ‘senior moment’ she managed to email one with a message she had meant to send the other, a message that by its content unwittingly revealed the fact that she was sleeping with the enemy.
The first client was not best pleased - and when she reluctantly explained to the other what had happened, she didn’t get the impression that he’d be buying her an expensive Christmas gift either. I felt so mortified on her behalf I almost forgot that Phil with the bad teeth from Reading now knew my phone number, thanks to my own inadequacies with technology.
But some good things can come out of email cock-ups.
For technical reasons too dull to go into and which I barely understand, I failed to see an email sent to me exactly a year ago from a product designer, offering me the chance of some really interesting copywriting work.
You can imagine how mortified I was when (for technical reasons too dull to go into, etc) I finally found this email this week. After pondering the idea of just deleting it and forgetting the whole thing, I decided instead to write and apologise, in a suitably obsequious way. I was delighted to receive a reply saying oh well, never mind, these things happen, I forgive you. And, she said, she was about to launch a new product and might need some help with PR once the prototype was ready. Oh and by the way, she added, why don’t you connect to me on LinkedIn?
I’m not sure what the moral of this story is (unless it‘s not to mess with technology you don‘t understand if you‘re an utter twerp), but maybe it’s something to do with karma or something.
Which is what I’ll tell John with the astonishingly ubiquitous tattoos from Horley if he phones to ask why I went off him.
By Sue Fenton of F Words copywriting services
www.fwords.co.uk