Apology from Geeklist

I could care less about Geeklist but from a purely analytical perspective: this is so "how not to write an apology" that someone ought to take it apart and do an annotated version of it as a lesson to the community. It literally starts out in its <i>first sentence</i> by undermining itself.<p>Incidentally, publicly threatening the job of someone who criticizes you (as a tit-for-tat for them "threatening your brand") is one of those slip-ups for which no apology is going to stem the tide of drama. I'm sure this will all be forgotten in a week, but until then: Geeklist is the villain and just needs to roll with it. As long as they're in this PR hole, maybe they should tie someone to a train track and make some demands.

"We never meant to offend any woman and are very sorry as we clearly have." and "In my wildest dreams we would never wish to offend any woman."<p>This is pretty frustrating, although I certainly accept that it's probably unintentional. I was offended by their behavior, and I'm not a woman.<p>I also don't appreciate the defensive "but I have tons of black friends" rhetoric. I don't care that they don't self-identify as sexist, and that their friends don't think they're sexist. I want to know that the really, deeply understand the problem and the subsequent feedback, and what is going to change moving forward. They're going to ask the producer to remove the video, but are they going to stop threatening people on twitter?

Hm, I wonder if this will be deleted as well? The two submissions of the Storify article were:<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3740378" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3740378</a><p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3739913" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3739913</a><p>I'm a little concerned/confused as to why. If the apology is HN-appropriate content then I'm a little surprised that the reason for the apology isn't.

They still seem to be missing the point. The worst part wasn't the video, which is a forgivable offense.<p>The fact that the founders openly threatened the woman who was complaining and their contract with her company as a means of shutting her up is egregious, and their only reference to that behavior in their apology is this:<p><pre><code> We could have handled it better.</code></pre>

"Never Ruin an Apology With an Excuse!"<p>The best advice I ever read... from a readers digest about 15 years ago.

Against my better judgement, I figured out what this whole thing was about in the first place: <a href="http://storify.com/charlesarthur/oh-hai-sexism" rel="nofollow">http://storify.com/charlesarthur/oh-hai-sexism</a>

<i>tl;dr version</i> - We didn't mean to offend women. We love women. We even know some women and sleep with them and stuff. (We aren't <i>those</i> kind of geeks who can't talk to girls.)

I am still surprised that a company like geeklist runs into such a trap[1]. Shouldn't they be knowing better? I mean, social networks are what they build, they should know the effect.<p>The whole internet was abuzz for a week about implied sexism and bad handling of women. But yet, they run into just the same hole. It doesn't even require to discuss the validity of the argument to see the problems in their handling: someone with high twitter reach complained about a questionable thing that they could easily drag in the trash bin (with a few phone calls). Was it even worth to pick that fight?<p>[1] Just to be clear: its a trap layed by themselves.

The lesson here is that defending a brand does not always mean getting defensive. Brand owners have to look at what is being attacked and decide how close it is to the core of the business. A t-shirt fashion shoot video is not the core of the Geeklist business model, so once it became a brand liability it needed to be cast off.<p>An example of a brand attack that DID call for a head-on approach was the iPhone 4 antenna issue. Those complaints directly attacked a core feature of one of Apple's core products. Apple needed to go on defense because they could not just cast off the iPhone 4 hardware design without very serious financial damage.<p>Brand owners also need to keep the personal and professional separate when their brand is under attack. Brands are created by a series of decisions. It is one or more of those decisions that are under attack, not the people who made them. In this case the issue was the decision to associate the Geeklist brand with this type of video. Decide whether or not that decision needs defending--don't mistake it for a personal attack.

Classic non-apology apology:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-apology_apology" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-apology_apology</a>

So....is this an apology or a design like whoa marketing scheme??

I expected at least a reference to them taking down one of their repos[1] to hide further criticism, but found none.<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/geeklist/jennifer" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/geeklist/jennifer</a>

Never argue with a fool, onlookers may not be able to tell the difference ~ <i>M. Twain</i>.<p>I for one am at a loss here.

Wow, this scream-sexism-at-everything police is becoming very annoying. I do not believe that the video is offensive at all.<p>I do think the Geeklist founders came across as petty in their constant back and forth with the lady. But to be clear, that has nothing to do with the video being offensive. It isn't.

I guess they didn't check this post on HN just yesterday? <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3733825" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3733825</a>

Can someone do a TLDR on the video?

I hope they issued a personal one to @shanley as well. Their argumentation was way worse than the video.

Ignoring the issue/apology, I find it incredibly off-putting that the designer who got up in arms about a racy video promoting Geeklist promotes t-shirts with a pantless woman on her home, FAQ, and Pricing pages: <a href="http://www.designlikewhoa.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.designlikewhoa.com/</a><p>Focusing on the issue, I would say we are no better off now than before the Twitter flame-war. A personal appeal and open discussion probably would have helped, though.<p>And oh - her site gets a lot of attention now. That's cool.