My email inbox has been even more active than usual this week. It seems that many of you—from all over the globe—received an invitation to Celent’s CIO event in Paris. And the best part was that the invitation went out once in English, and a second time in French!

My apologies to those of you who are not in proximity to Paris. While Paris is lovely in May, we didn’t expect many of you who live elsewhere to make the trip just for our event. Process and technology issues resulted in that email going out to a wider audience than we intended.

Reflecting on this experience triggers a few observations. First, I am grateful that so many of you read your Celent emails, in any language. Second, I’d like to assure you that our goal is to repay your trust by effectively and consistently delivering value to your email inbox. We have just added a person to the Celent team who will focus on how we interact with you electronically, so you should feel improvements almost immediately. Finally, this event reinforces our view that digital marketing is a powerful tool that can also amplify even the slightest misstep. Maybe I could have just said that to you directly instead of demonstrating it with a misstep in French?

But as my high school French teacher always said, in a rhyme that otherwise is a head scratcher: “C’est la vie. C’est la guerre. Ce n’est pas une pomme de terre.” (That’s life. That’s war. That’s not a potato.) And don't be surprised if you get a more appropriate invitation to another Celent event, closer to you. We've got a full calendar for the balance of 2011.