The Email Wars

If you are familiar with Twitter, then you are very close with the Fail Whale. For those of you that have yet to meet the Fail Whale (and I think that the community might have named it such, not the brand) I have placed a image of it in the wild for you below. I can tell you it is much better than a animated GIF of a monkey banging on a server with a wrench and even a better user experience than a 404 error page. But what can we learn from the Fail Whale.

First: It is OK to fail. If you are not trying to swing for the fence then often times you are not going to hit a home run. We often take the safe route to email campaigns, list segmentation, and creative while not thinking about the game changing ideas that will lead us to greatness.

Second: Communities of the 2.0 world are used to failure. Seems odd huh? Many of the 2.0 companies and sites are moving so fast in a land grab movement that they are rapidly releasing feature sets, looking for user feedback, getting data points to build against and still gaining traction. How long can this method last and actually win? We have already seen how people start to shift after constant outages, errors or down time. Does you campaign fail to deliver? If you had a bad link in the email creative will they be upset or be a shopper next time they get an email? If this mind set proves anything it shows us that people are more forgiving today then they have been in the past, even though this seems like a massive step backwards to the place that we are today with the internet and email marketing.

Third: Although sucky (yes I used that word grammar freaks), the Fail Whale created more posts, articles, media and PR from a traditional and groundswell point of view that it helped the brand gain more visibility. Just check out Flickr for some examples or just do a news search for the results.

The End: It continues to be tolerated but for how long? The movement of people to embrace other similar systems that are more stable thus far like Plurk, Pownce or others. I think that we can read these stories and think about how we can embrace failure when trying to hit a home run. No one ever gets it 100% right even when you think you have launched the best email campaign ever. There is always a percentage of failure and even more important a percentage of learning that we can all embrace.

I personally hope to encounter the Fail Whale less now that some major people are behind Twitter. We as an online society have a higher tolerance, but in the end your boss and CEO will not.