Our Apology To SMX Advanced Attendees Who Received Unsolicited E-mail
Earlier this month, we shared the email addresses of about 400 SMX Advanced attendees with five of our sponsors when we shouldn’t have. We apologize sincerely for having done so.
When someone signs up for an SMX event in the United States, we ask if they are willing to share their postal address with selected sponsors. This option is NOT selected by default. Instead, a registrant has to deliberately enable it – make a conscious choice to share their postal address.
About 350 people did this. But rather than share only postal addresses, we also sent some sponsors their email addresses by mistake.
About 50 other people were registered by our events management company, rather than filling out the online registration form themselves. This happened in a few cases such as group registration, people paying by check and for a very small number of speakers who didn’t enroll themselves personally into the registration system (including our conference chair, Danny Sullivan). In these cases, the option to share postal addresses was selected, when it shouldn’t have been. Email addresses for these people were also shared.
We’ve contacted all the sponsors that received addresses, and they’ve agreed to make no further use of them. No one should get any further mailings due to our mistake.
Over the past three years since Third Door Media was founded, we’ve literally spent days discussing how to handle email addresses in a manner that makes good business sense but also keeps the trust of our customers.
Our policy has been to never sell or share email addresses with third parties except for those who attend Search Marketing Now webcasts – and this is clearly stated before they sign-up. Other than that, email addresses only get shared if you attend an SMX event and you allow a vendor to scan your conference badge, which transmits your email. We’ve felt both these cases stuck a good balance of sharing with permission.
Sharing the 400 email addresses as we did was wrong, and we’re embarrassed it happened. While it doesn’t correct that wrong, we also maintain over 20 different newsletters and contact lists that collectively contain over 50,000 addresses, and we’ve never shared any of those with third parties. We hope that careful control over the long term will restore trust with any who may have lost some with us because of this mistake.