Did Terry blow it?

Last week when I left my post on Daily Fix about Terry McBride's unique marketing philosophy of community-empowerment at Nettwerk, CK had the great suggestion in the comments that I should send the post to some music publications. Proving that great minds think alike, I was thinking along the same lines, but I wanted to bring the post to the attention of Terry himself.

So I did some digging on MySpace, found that he had a page, and send a 'friend request' to him to add me to his friends. Terry added me within an hour, which is pretty fast. I then let him know about the post I had written about him on DF, and he quickly thanked me. My thinking was that he would go leave a short comment on the DF post, which would of course elicit a very positive response from the DF community. Honestly, I would have liked Terry to read my post and like it from an ego-standpoint, but really I wanted Terry to respond on DF because I knew it would be great exposure for Nettwerk in the DF community, and the flipside is that it would be great for Ann and DF to get feedback from one of the more progressive CEOs in the world.

But it never happened.

Now at first I thought 'Well he IS extremely busy and I'm just lucky that he even answered me on MySpace, most CEOs would have NEVER done that'. But then I realized that my love of Nettwerk as a label was probably clouding my judgment a bit, because if another company had missed a golden opportunity to reach out to their community like this, I would have called them on it.

So to Terry McBride, Erin Kinghorn, and all the other great people at Nettwerk, I still love you guys, but you blew it here.

I get that Terry is extremely busy, but a quick 'Hey guys, thanks for the kind words!' comment on DF would have taken 60 seconds tops, and gotten Terry a TON of positive pub in the blogosphere. Remember the 'Miami Vice episode'?

I also sent Terry a link to my 100 CDs For 100 Bloggers idea, and from what I could tell from my SiteMeter referrals, he didn't take the time to check that out either.

Again, I am tempted to cut Terry a ton of slack because Nettwerk really has gone far beyond their competitors in reaching out to their fans. Terry now makes SIX Nettwerk employees that have contacted me this year.

But at the same time, this was a golden opportunity for Terry to reach out to bloggers and really create a snowball of positive exposure for Nettwerk much the same way that Universal did earlier this summer by contacting Chris about Miami Vice. The good news is that I have a feeling that Nettwerk will listen, and learn from this.


UPDATE: Terry responds in the comments. Good for him, and good for Nettwerk.