VentureBeat inadvertently stirred up a storm of controversy when we published a guest post about marketing automation.

The guest post, by Justin Gray of LeadMD, looked innocuous enough at first. To our editors, it at first seemed like a straightforward list of the pros and cons of several different marketing automation solutions: Eloqua, Genius, Marketo, Pardot and Silverpop.

Unfortunately, when we published the post we neglected to mention one important fact: Gray’s company, LeadMD, is a reseller of one of those services, Marketo.

For the full story, which explains what happened and includes a Q&A with Joe Chernov of marketing automation vendor Eloqua, see What the !@#$ is marketing automation? | VentureBeat.