Yesterday I signed up for the life web coverage of the exciting unveiling of the new IBM PureSystem which was hosted not by IBM but by external virtual event organizer Unisfair. Nothing wrong there. Each to its own and they are probably better in organizing these kind of things, but….

I have two pet peeves with how they organized it:

1. At registration you could indicate whether IBM & Affiliates are allowed to contact you by mail, phone or postal mail. I deselected all entries and saved. Guess what. Postal mail and Phone were automatically selected anyway which I saw in a flash while the page was saving. Even logging in and editing the settings does not allow you to deselect this. Sure, it will look deselected but save, switch page and come back and it’s selected again (and yes, I cleared my cache).
Big interface No No here. Even if that is actually saved as deselected you should never show it as selected as it is confusing and misleading. If it is saved as an approval then even worse, don’t give a user an option that really isn’t an option!

2. The second one (and yeah, I know I’m nitpicking here) is that when you organize an event for a major player like IBM and require the attendees to registeryou should at least make sure you know that customers products. So don’t send out a registration message with an “Outlook reminder” option….. sigh

Big issues? No, the first one I simply corrected by changing my info to fictional data and the second one… Well… I’m probably one of the few that even noticed.

But…. it does influence my feeling about the whole thing and makes me distrusting of it all. So if you use external companies to organize events and campaigns for you, make sure they obey to the same standards you do, are familiar with your products and don’t call out competitors products in their communications to your customers. The same goes for organizers. Know your client! It really doesn’t take much now a days for customers to get weary and distrusting on the Internet and that can directly impact the brand as well as you as an organizer….