Bzzzzzzz.

Your alarm goes off, but you hit the snooze. It keeps buzzing though, and you curse your aunt for buying you that stupid all in one foot massager/alarm clock from Sharper Image (yeah, I wasn’t aware that they were still in business either….).

But wait a minute, it’s not your alarm clock! It’s your cell phone, and there’s an emergency at the office. You quickly throw on a pair of pants (no undies though, it’s been “laundry day” for at least 2.5 weeks) and your favorite Threadless tee. Jumping in the car, you quickly consider the options and decide that yes, the extra 3.8 minutes it takes to stop by that brand new Starbucks drive-through (it’s just so convenient) on the way to the office will pay for itself. Hey, if Barry Bonds can get away with juicing up, so can you. Good thing caffeine is legal or you’d be in big trouble mister.

Arriving at corporate headquarters, you hit the power buttons on all four monitors (because programmers love big screens). HAL boots up, and you start investigating right away. Your server farm figured it was a good idea to upgrade itself to the latest version of its search indexing software, but it didn’t compile correctly. Ouch. Now thousands of customers can’t search your web site, and the natives are getting restless. You consider updating your company’s blog to let everyone know you’re working on the problem, but decide it’s probably faster to just get the thing compiled.

Quit what you’re doing right now, because you just made a huge mistake. You made a decision involving customers, but you didn’t approach it like a marketer. There’s a surprise waiting for you here–Afterthought Myth #3: marketing isn’t only about how you treat new customers, but existing ones too–and you’re ignoring it. Sure, it might only take you 5 minutes to roll back to the previous version of your search application, but it might take you 5 hours or 5 days. Like so many engineering problems, you just don’t know how long it’ll take until you’re done.

Here’s another shocker: how long it takes to fix doesn’t matter, and you need to spend 2 minutes to update that blog anyway. Being transparent about a problem you’re facing, and the steps you’re taking to solve it, are your heaviest artillery in fending off irate customers who can’t believe you would have the guts to purposely break your search engine on a Monday morning at 6am.

I know and you know and you know that I know that you didn’t break the search engine on purpose; it just happened. But that’s not how your customers see it, and until you inform them otherwise, they’re going to form all sorts of conspiracy theories (at least half of which involve Bill O’Reilly or Karl Rove) about why it just isn’t working. It’s not their fault–you’re just not giving them enough data.

Now that you’ve updated the blog (right?!?), you can get back to fixing the bug. Sure, you’ve just broadcasted to the world that you screwed up and broke something, but is showing your human side really a bad thing?

Oh, and if you thought you could get around the problem by blaming the search engine or your server farm or some other inanimate object, quit reading right now because you just missed the entire point of this post.

Ugh. Wait, hold on a second. Since I’m such a nice guy, and since you have such a thick skull, I’ll try one more time to explain this to you:

Mistakes happen. Act human. Confess right away. Fix the problem. Rinse and repeat.

You don’t have to thank me for the advice. You can, however, thank me for the hours you’ll save doing damage control after the fact–since keeping your customers in the loop helped them realize that a) mistakes do happen, b) you’re a human being who is actively working hard to fix it, and c) you weren’t deliberately trying to destroy their entire day in the process. But then you have to mean it.

Cool?