The Ghost in the Machine

TECHNO TALES The horror, the horror.

Come on kids, circle up around the fire. There's no better way to mark Halloween than with a good old-fashioned horror story. Unfortunately for Jim and Audri Lanford, this one really happened.

Late last year the Lanfords, who run an Internet marketing business called NetRageous Inc. in Olney, Md., launched a new Web site at www.FreeFurby.com. FreeFurby.com rewarded Web surfers for filling out a marketing survey by giving away Furby toys. (No matter what you think of Furbies, we haven't gotten to the scary part yet.)

The Lanfords' goal was to create goodwill for an eventual e-commerce site. In the course of promoting the Furby giveaway, NetRageous contracted with its usual Seattle-based fax broadcasting service to distribute its press releases to 1,100 or so radio stations around the country. So one dark and stormy night, Audri Lanford, CEO of NetRageous, wrote a one-page press release and shipped it off for distribution. Alas, when the broadcasting service began to distribute the release, it included an additional 25 to 500 pages of random typographic marks, all attributed to NetRageous. And the automated system refaxed this compendium of gibberish to the same stations over and over and over again.

Other things were going on that day -- the Clinton impeachment, U.S. planes bombing Iraq -- and the radio stations were understandably irate about having their fax machines tied up. The complaints began to pour into NetRageous's offices, and they were notably lacking in goodwill.

"Our phone rang basically nonstop for seven hours," says Audri Lanford.

The problem was compounded and extended because when NetRageous called the fax service to stop the madness, the company's business day had not yet begun and there was no one in the office except a receptionist, who didn't know how to stop the fax. When the staff did arrive, it took NetRageous three hours to convince them there was a problem. "People in technical fields are often hard to convince if you suggest that their systems are at fault," says the Lanfords.

It took most of the day for the service provider to fix the problem. The fax company also wound up paying damages to some radio stations and compensated NetRageous by providing lots and lots of free faxing and paying for some of the expenses the Lanfords incurred.

NetRageous extracted these lessons for broadcast marketing:

1. If you use a service, make sure the company provides a 24-hour phone number and guarantees that it will be able to stop your transmission in case of an emergency.

2. If your service provider doesn't recognize the problem immediately, provide the unfortunate fax recipients the service provider's phone number. In other words, share your pain.

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