There have been some corporate blunders this week. One was Paypal freezing the account of somebody buying toys for kids. The other was Download dot com who added evil malware to an open source tool. The interesting thing to see was how the company responded to their wrongdoing. Or should I say it was interesting to see who was assigned the task to apologize to the user community.Download dot com came out strong. They had the attractive Catherine Hwang draft a response. She looks like a cute asian girl. Who is going to continue to be up at arms with Download dot com when Catherine says sorry?
Paypal, on the other hand, Anuj Nayar put out a release on the toys for tots issue. Yeah he may be the director of communications at Paypal. But yikes. I could repeat some of the comments on Hacker News about this guy's photo. But that would be plain mean.
Here is the outtake. Make sure somebody attractive doles out the apologies when your company screws up. It will only help the reponse to be received warmly.
