1) A clean, unconditional apology, like: "I screwed up, I'm going to fix it". I had very little hope since people don't often admit this type of things.
2) A defensive apology (that is, not really an apology): "Yeah I kinda screwed up a tiny little bit, but really it wasn't my fault, the predecessors..."
3) A smart-ass offensive strategy: "aha, you don't get it, our t-shirts are really cool, you should be happy that we even offer gifts and recognitions, you ungrateful bastards"
My ideal answer would have been 1) of course. Turns out, he exceeded my expectations (I'm the cynical jerk, here). He was a good guy in the story, explained the situation without fake apologies, or anything. Great answer.
That is PR jiu-jitsu. Make everyone feel good, make yourself look good and don't even use the word "sorry". Of course, it helps that you were "in the right" to begin with, but deftly handled, nevertheless...
Neither of those call for saying, "I'm sorry" or "I apologize" and saying either seems to detract a bit. I could be wrong? It's interesting to think about.
He also wrote thank you notes.
Very old school. My grandmother would be proud.
T-shirt-gaters need to lighten the heck up.
> it helps that you were "in the right" to begin with
It's striking when you can tell whether an answer is honest/no-nonsense. And not even an overdone apology can beat an honest-to-goodness straight forward answer.
Guy tries to do something nice and gets a big slap on the face. I can imagine this reaction from those outside of Yahoo wanting big rewards for their discoveries, sad to hear it was coming from internal as well.
Brilliantly handled.
Personally, I think it's ridiculous that this was blown so far out of proportion, all because someone went above and beyond with his own resources trying to thank reporters. But then I don't have both sides of the story and, frankly, I'm not going to go looking for internet anger to figure it out.