[davidbnewquist]

The "Make your mistakes visible" advice seems to have merit based on the offered axion: "Telling the truth even when you don’t have to is good evidence that you’re trustworthy."

But I can't think of any marketeers that have taken this advice. I wonder how effective it would be if Microsoft ran a campaign saying: "although we enabled user account control by default to increase security, we admit that it came across as 'chatty and annoying' for most users."

Such a strategy may be especially useful to reduce impact of a competitor using a mistake in negative marketing.

[Timothee]

A friend of mine was talking just this morning about how he had thought about keeping a blog to go along his learning of iPhone development but was worried about being public about basic stuff, thus making him look bad. (like it happened to a certain dev from Pownce) And even though I believe being candid about what you don't know or your mistakes should be generally laudable (because you're not pretending, are just honest about your pitfalls, and willing to work on them), it can very easily backfire.

It's very similar when a company acknowledges their mistakes: some smart people would look at it and praise the company for it, others will just continue the bashing. It can work but it's tricky, and the bigger the company, the trickier it gets.