E-mailing Nightmare - It could happen to you!

Email newsletter problem effects 35,000 insurance professionals. Learn how to avoid this happening to you!

Last week, Selling with Technology.com, the leading expert in insurance Internet marketing, experienced one of those life lessons that no business likes to experience, but can use to grow and learn from, then assist their clients to prevent the same situation from happening to them.

With that in mind, Selling with Technology.com has decided to share how the power of Internet marketing can go awry, and how to protect themselves from those dangers.
      
Here's the story:

As usual, the free newsletter, The Virtual Insurance News, was written and ready to be sent out to its 25,000 plus insurance industry subscribers. Selling with Technology has always preached that automation is the key to increasing a companys profits and reducing its costs. Following its philosophy, Selling with Technology.com automated its website, allowing its readers to subscribe and unsubscribe automatically. The database of subscribers resided on the companys website, protected behind layers of security. The newsletter could be distributed from this "open" database, using a modified e-mail system. It seemed like a great idea; easy, accurate and safe.

What followed was an Internet marketers nightmare. After the June 11th, 2002, newsletter was sent out, one of Selling with Technology's competitors somehow concluded that it owned the exclusive right to an article, which had been released, to Selling with Technology for publication. He responded with this e-mail:

Plagiarism - You have copied 'Title Insurance v. Non-Title Insurance Alternatives' from our website without permission. If you do not remove it from your site within 24 hours we will be forced to take legal action against your company.

Unfortunately, this misguided competitor decided to copy his accusatory message to all of Selling with Technologys subscribers, so he hit the "reply all" key. This vague but alarming message was sent to every one of Selling with Technologys subscribers multiple times, more than 200,000 of them.

You can imagine what happened. Thousands of insurance industry executives received an e-mail, which seemed to accuse them of plagiarism. In the hustle and bustle of the business day, many of them did not realize that this message was a copy of the message sent to someone else. Some even thought that it was Selling with Technology that was accusing them. Moreover, when some of them tried to reply to this seeming accusation, they hit the "reply all" button, since the original message to them had been sent that way.

This resulted in their correspondence also being sent to all newsletter subscribers, multiplying the confusion.

The Selling with Technology staff went into action. They contacted their counsel, who     determined that the article in question had been released for publication by the copyright owner and that there was no issue of infringement or plagiarism.

Selling with Technology also assured those customers that contacted it that they were not being     accused of anything wrong and assisted them in working with their ISPs or servers who might believe the subscriber was "spamming" the system because of the multiple messages or worse being accused of plagiarism and possible legal action.

Despite the staff's efforts, the harm was done to Selling with Technology.com. It lost     numerous subscribers and its reputation was seriously impugned. All because of a false     accusation!

There are several morals to this story:

1. If youre using the Internet for mass distribution of information, use a dedicated single distribution program, rather than regular e-mail with a web-based database function.

2. Check your system's security regularly. You never know when, or how, you may be compromised.

3. Dont reply to any e-mail if dont know who it is from or what it is about. Be careful of the "reply all" button, you may not be aware of the full list of recipients of the original message.
(Many e-mail programs include a "blind copy" function, which allows multiple copies to be sent without the original recipient being aware of them.)

4. Make sure you have the proper insurance coverage in case this happens to you!

BTW, if you are a subscriber to Selling with Technology's newsletter and have encountered any problems with your ISP, server, Spam organizations or legal concerns due to this email and/or are interested in finding out how you can avoid the same situation that Selling with Technology.com experienced, you can contact Patricia A. Berry at 562-901-9833 for a free consultation and assistance.