• Forbes.com, Monday, December 17, 2007 11:03 AM

Forbes.com looks back at the year in CEO apologies, starting with Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, who recently had to apologize for touting his company's privacy-violating peer-to-peer recommendation system, Beacon, as the greatest media invention of the last hundred years. The report claims that such apologies are becoming so commonplace that the executive apology has become a sector of study for public relations groups.

"You have to act like a leader," says Torod Neptune, crisis management leader at tech-focused PR firm Waggener Edstrom. "Get out ahead of something and manage it before it becomes a crisis. If you act quickly enough, an apology can even make your brand stronger." Zuckerberg's apology, for example, was the right move, as was the company's decision to change its program accordingly.

Other high profile apologies include Yahoo's Jerry Yang, who was forced to clean up the Chinese government compliance mess, in which Yahoo reported the email records of a human-rights blogger, leading to his imprisonment. Unfortunately, Yahoo was late in apologizing, and it took a public tongue lashing from Congress to convince the company to compensate the Chinese journalist's family.

The last of the high profile '07 apologies came from Apple's Steve Jobs, who was forced to quell angry iPhone owners after the company slashed the handset's price by $200 just two months after its release. Jobs apologized within 24 hours and then offered those customers $100 coupons at Apple's stores.

Read the whole story at Forbes.com »