HP Deletes Negative Corporate Blogger Comments

Thomas Hawk writes "HP has recently been making the rounds promoting their new company blogging efforts. Nora Denzel, HP's senior vice president and general manager of HP's Adaptive Enterprise and Software Global Business Unit has started a podcast and a number of new bloggers including David Gee, the head of worldwide marketing for HP's management software business, have also started company blogs. So imagine my surprise when I tried to legitimately leave a comment critical of HP at David Gee's HP blog and had my comment quickly erased and my HP passport (required to leave comments) revoked. Is it one-sided blogging to only let people say positive things about your company on your blog?" Update: 05/07 04:24 GMT by Z : Indeed, "Update: It would appear that David Gee has changed his mind and has reinstated my comment along with a comment from him saying he would pass the feedback along. A good first step. I've asked for an explanation as to why it was removed and hopefully will hear back soon."

Comments

change of heart?

[lecithin]

Sounds like they admitted what they did. Did it take a bunch of bad PR for them to have a change of heart?

"Earlier this week, an HP customer posted a comment about his experience upgrading a media center PC. His experience was not good and he let us know. We pulled the comment. This was a bad decision and we have reversed it."

From Hawks Blog

[Anonymous Coward]

Update: It would appear that David Gee has changed his mind and has reinstated my comment along with a comment from him saying he would pass the feedback along. A good first step. I've asked for an explanation as to why it was removed and hopefully will hear back soon.

i'm not surprised

[Adult film producer]

corporate blogs are just another arm of their public relations department, everything needs to be positive, big whoop. Once in a while they might include *insider* information, but thats usually sanctioned..

Really, find a way to blog anonymously and rip your company to shreds. Fucked Company or whatever is probably a good way to go about it.

How the situation went down

[me at werk]

In Customer Intimacy:

<May 5, 2005 2:26:43 PM PDT> thomashawk complained about the media center pc support

(Tom's post disappears, Tom writes a /. story rightly believing he was censored)

<May 6, 2005 4:14:43 PM PDT> D Gee responded and apologized for tom's bad experience

<May 6, 2005 4:41:33 PM PDT> thomashawk replied, saying: "Thanks for responding David. Can you explain why my initial comment was deleted and then reinstated? Thanks, Tom"

<May 6, 2005 6:23:53 PM PDT> D Gee informed him: "Tom - you can see my response in my entry "Taking it on the chin""

(Friday May 06, @07:24PM PDT, Slashdot post hits frontpage about HP censorship)

We had no effect on this. They changed their mind BEFORE they got publically shamed for it. Not that I'm agreeing with them removing the comment in the firstplace, but it's interesting.

Re:How the situation went down

[Thomas Hawk]

Here is some additional info on what went on during the day. I don't think that HP or David knew about the Slashdot post prior to the change of heart but I did start applying pressure earlier in the day.

Thursday evening, May 5th at 9:41 pm. I sent the following message to David Gee at HP "Nice. At least I took a screen shot."

On Friday morning at 7:15 a.m. I still had not heard back from Gee or had the post reinstated so I blogged about my experience.

At 9:07 a.m. on Friday morning I submitted the story to Slashdot. They accepted it later in the day but it took until the end of the day for it to show up.

By Friday morning at 10:54 I still had not heard from David or had my post reinstated so I sent an email about the incident to Steve Rubel (who had originally posted the story about HP blogging), Robert Scoble (an A list blogger and someone who preaches transparency), Mark Cuban, Fred Wilson (a VC who had previously written about censoring comments), and Michael Gartenberg (an influential JupiterResearch) who does not publish comments on his corporate blog but has gone out of his way to try and engage bloggers in Jupiter's publishing. I'd had interaction in the past with all of these bloggers and thought they might be interested and/or sympathetic regarding my story.

Within 15 minutes Cuban emailed me back and suggested that this is pretty much what I should expect from a corporate blog and that they have other constituencies to consider and that it's not as if there weren't other outlets for my criticism. All valid points. I still can't believe that Cuban answers his own emails and have found him amazingly accessible as a blogger for someone who has got so many other things going on in his life. He's offered me some really good advice in the past.

I also sent a separate email to Dan Gillmor telling him about the story and the fact that Slashdot had accepted the story. I did this prior to Gee's reinstating my comment and prior to it being published at Slashdot. Dan subsequently posted a story on the incident today.

At 11:31 a.m. I emailed a response back to Cuban, Rubel, Scoble, Wilson and Gartenberg and this time cc:d David Gee at HP. I thanked Mark Cuban for his response but still expressed that I thought that it was bogus for HP to present this blogging thing as an open and honest way to engage customers and then to censor negative opinions - it particularly rubbed me wrong as the title of the post was "Customer Intimacy."

That's pretty much everything else that happened in addition to the timeline above by way of transparency and background.

For what it's worth, although Gee knew that I had engaged some A list bloggers on this story, I don't think that he knew that it was going to end up on Slashdot.

In either case though if it were of his own volition or by pressure from A list bloggers or even pressure from Slashdot, in the end the result is the same and it's positive and I don't think that HP will be censoring any more negative comments.

I do think that David Gee and HP are sincere in their efforts to blog and I hope that they can do something as positive as Robert Scoble has done for corporate blogging up at Microsoft. This could be a great way for HP to legitimately, honestly and seriously engage their customers.

I agree with David that it was a learning experience and I also strongly believe that everyone deserves a second chance. I've made plenty of mistakes before. The fact is that David owned up to it and did the right thing. And because of that act alone HP picked up a lot of credibility in my book, even if it had to be done in a less than fun way for them.

And people are right, the comment was not particularly well written. I wrote it quickly and off the cuff and quite frankly never expected it to get this kind of attention. I was also kind of mocking his post by using the "Customer D:" angle. I probably could have been much more constructive in my approach an

Re:Taking it on the chin?

[abandonment]

taking a punch and dealing with it instead of whining and crying about it. basically admitting you've made a mistake...

Blogs have credibility as long as they're honest

[bzipitidoo]

Some of these fool authority figures think that it is the blog that has the credibilty, and not the honesty that has the credibility. They think they can have it both ways, at least for a little while. So they censor all balance and negativity out of the blog, and think it'll keep its credibilty, hopefully indefinitely, but at least long enough for them to make the next quarterly sales and stock targets. By then, the next medium with an undeserved reputation for honesty will be ready for exploitation.

TV used to have fantastic credibility, back in, say, the 1950s. Now, whenever a commercial comes on, people automatically zone out. Most commericials are irritating because they are not entertaining, not realistic, and not honest. Blogs may go the same way.

This doesn't have a thing to do with having the "right" to decide what material should be on their server. They're trying to convince people that they're genuine. Now everyone sees that they aren't. They blew it.