Things go wrong from time to time – you misread the ingredients when baking a batch of biscuits and end up with baked gloop, or you send an email to the wrong person because you momentarily rely on your email program’s auto-addressing. In these scenarios you admit to the mistake and do not serve gloop to your guests hoping they won’t notice, or you send an apology to the confused email recipient.

Public errors can be embarrassing but if you cover them up, especially with the immediacy of blogging, twittering, and status updates, a few disgruntled people can cause a snowball of bad feeling against a brand.

I received a newsletter from Air New Zealand and was happy to see them prominently admit to an error with their unsubscribe functionality that might have caused some people who had previously unsubscribed to receive the latest newsletter. Although the issue did not affect me personally, it makes me feel good that they took the effort to acknowledge their mistake.

Even if I was affected by the issue, the simple explanation and instructions on how to unsubscribe would have left me feeling satisfied that they were owning the mistake and caring for me as a person by helping me unsubscribe easily.

Air New Zealand's Amail