Best Buy Mistakenly Exposes Their Exclusive Blogger List

Best Buy, in a recent internal communication to their Wolf Bloggers exclusive blogger list, sent out an email to their list of bloggers about an agreement with another affiliate organization. In the email, they CCd everyone. One of the bloggers subsequently Replied All to the list, which then exposed Best Buy’s entire exclusive blogger list. The list contains the email addresses of hundreds of bloggers who Best Buy pays to blog about products sold in Best Buy stores. Best Buy also send those bloggers certain products to test and review.

I am on the list of Best Buy’s bloggers, although I have not ever received any of Best Buy’s products to test and review. As a result of being on that list, my email address, along with all of the other email addresses of all of the other bloggers in Best Buy’s exclusive blogger network. Perhaps this might be a content marketer’s dream to have these email contacts?

Here is part of the email that was sent from the blogger, doing a “reply all” rather than a “reply” to Best Buy’s email. I have removed some of the email because some of the information may be proprietary to Best Buy.

From: [email protected]
Date: December 19, 2014 at 7:06:39 AM CST
To: WOLFBloggers

Granted, if Best Buy had used something else other than a BCC in the email, then there would not have been any way for this one sole blogger to “reply all” and reveal Best Buy’s whole entire exclusive blogger email list to everyone. I recommend that in the future Best Buy use an email list (email marketing software) to send these communications out rather than using the BCC feature of email. In that case, the blogger replying to the email would then only email Best Buy, and not the whole entire email list, revealing their contact information in the process.

Since I am on this email list, I realize the confidentiality of it, and what could potentially be done with the list by content marketers, SEOs, or digital marketing agencies. So, I am not going to release the list, under any circumstances.

However, I would like to remind everyone–especially those sending out critical communications to employees, vendors, and affiliates:

Please do not use the CC field when sending out a mass email.