Slashdot Mirror
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."
They have no obligation to host data on their servers that doesn't benefit them. If you have something negative to say about HP you have every right to publicize your message. HP doesn't have to pay for it, though.
Did you think you have the RIGHT to post something on their site and have it published continuously? It's their server, they can do what they want. Publish your own freaking blog. Your Rights Online, indeed.
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Regardless of them reversing their decision, they have no obligation (moral or legal) to keep any comments on their site that they don't want to keep.
Point is - can you trust them not to do so in the future?
They've pulled comments once and could easily continue to do so - I doubt most people would care enough to make a stink about it.
There is always a frontier where there is an open and willing mind
You made a jackass comment that was neither well written nor respectful (as you described it in your own blog post) on a company blog. I'm surprised they even put it back up.
HP, of course, associated with these people (read: they pay them to blog). The blog is meant to get them attention, and free advertising. Posting thoughtful comments is really not what they have in mind: they want "HP Goooooooood" comments on the site. Naturally, someone being critical of the company that is hosting such a site will be silenced.
Do, do not, or delegate to someone else: there is no try.
Can you trust their blogs in the first place? How do you know positive comments aren't just astroturf?
I think the point is that corporate blogs can be (and will increasingly be) used as marketing tools and should be treated with the same skepticism that you'd treat an advertisement or PR release.
"No. Because you're free to set up your own site and comment. Why the hell should they allow you to post whatever you want on their resources: get your own site."
/. to let others know. The blog they got going is a PR marketing tool and a new one at that. Deleting negative posts has a negative effect on that PR. If their only way to deal with negative comments is to delete them that speaks volumes of their ability to handle it in a PR kind of way.
Sure, that is one answer. Another is to use a site like
B.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
would this kind of uproar exist if i started deleting comments from my lj?
this is a serious case of tempest in a teapot. this is a non-issue of the most serious kind.
last time i checked, your blog was yours to do what you want with. you don't have to leave comments you don't like on it. you aren't even obligated to allow comments. a 'blog' isn't some special magic forum where everyone is guaranteed a voice. it's just a fancy word we use for 'self-absorbed masturbation with words on a website'
slow news day, much?
hell, if this post reaches -1, Offtopic or -1, Troll I don't think I'll get a front page article on k5 lamenting how 'Slashdot is trying to have it both ways'
gods..
Folks who think know damn well that no matter how good you are someone will had have something bad to say.
/.) would disappear :-)
An undeserved rant requires no response as it pretty well speaks for itself.
A poster is likely quite pleased to see some of his comments pulled. I know I wish some of mine(no not on HP or
HP's stated intention on that blog is to have an open dialogue with customers. That *implies* both good and bad comments. It does not explicitly say that they are going to publish anything, but there is an expectation that they will publish negative comments as well. To do so reduces the blog to another advertising avenue, which is fine except if they admitted that then no one would go there.
So basically HP was intellectually dishonest about the intention of the blog, and if you read the rest of the comments you see they are almost all a bunch of ring-kissing cheerleader posts. The fact that they re-posted the comment is not impressive at all, it just means they aren't completely incompetent at damage control.
Personally I have nothing for or against HP, but this blog doesn't really seem worth the time or effort to look at, and the people involved with it have lost my trust.
If they want to impress people clearing away the negative comments isn't the way. (I guess they know that now) The way to really impress people is how they can handle it by adding a good reply or response to the comment and certainly by attempting to make-up for it in some way.
Every consumer knows not everything will be perfect every time. We expect it and while we accept that it happens, sometimes it is at the wrong time or is too expensive a mistake. A company can take such an opportunity to really shine their brightest by acting in the consumer's interests. Nothing could say more about how a company conducts business than how it handles the unfortunate situations that will occur no matter how hard they try to avoid it.
By revoking a comment simply because it was critical they showed they cant be trusted. Since HP is a big company and not just a 4 year old, saying "I'm sorry, and wont do that again" isn't good enough.
They need to provide something to gain peoples trust back, which will either be very creative or take a immense amount of time. This move alone is just PR, and probably doesn't indicate anything. Even if it does, HP will still have to work for years to gain peoples trust.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
a blog, a term that means one thing - a site for public news and discourse
When it comes right down to it, a blog is just a set of web pages that are updated frequently in a diary-like fashion. Why should they treat them any differently than other pages on their web site?
Eric
Very regularly. Try going over to http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/ and entering something which departs from the party. Then count to ten...
Not respectful, not on topic, not even clear what the complaint is.
e nt%20Screenshot-2005.05.06-08.19.47.jpg for screen shot.
If I were HP, would delete it simply for incoherence.
See http://thomashawk.com/hello/305309/1024/HP%20Comm
A more more appropriate conclusion: Hp can deal with having a story like this on the front page of /.
Great press. No, really. Did Carly orchestrate this from beyond the "grave"?
It's great to know VA Software is censo^Wactively poring over our complaints and comments to bring us the best meta-news environment possible.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
While I agree with the parent's message in spirit, in practice it is incorrect to treat a corporation as monolithic. Legal doctrines arising from obscure footnotes in Supreme Court decisions written by clerks notwithstanding (Corporate Personhood) a corporation is actually a collection of disparate people of varying viewpoints, abilities, levels of knowledge, loyalty and engagement, often with widely divergent agendas, ruled over in an autocratic and massively inefficient manner. Those supposedly in control are insulated by so many layers of hierarchy from the actual day-to-day operations that they have no idea about what is actually going on in their business (a defense put forth in some of the recent corporate corruption trials), but instead rely on increasingly diluted summaries, overviews and statistics that are generated by people whose livelihood depends on putting the best face on things no matter what. Conversely, the directives received by the peons on whom the company actually depends are so mangled and misrepresented by the time they have filtered down through all the intervening layers of management as to scarcely resemble what the people at the top actually want. To the extent that corporations are successful, they are so because of the independent and often uncoordinated actions of small groups of talented and extremely dedicated people who manage to succeed despite their resistant corporate culture. When corporations fail, it is because these nuggets of productivity do not successfully counteract the rest of the rotting, bloated twitching carcass. My point is, we don't know, if it was simply the administrator of the blog who removed the negative comments, his manager who directed him to do it, or a stultifying policy straight from the top.
But they call it a blog, a term that means one thing - a site for public news and discourse.
Oh, is that the definition. Interesting. And here I was thinking "Blog" was merely a stupid abbreviation of "Web log". It would therefore mean that it is some kind of a web-journal where regular entries are made.
And personally, on my weblog, I'm not going to have any inhibitions about deleting whatever comments I want, for whatever reason I want. It's not a "site for public news and discourse". It's a site where I spew lies, write boring shit, display my incompetence for all to see, and occasionally put something interesting up (Much like Slashdot!) I think HP ought to have the same privilege on their own site.
Random and weird software I've written.
Speaking of "Utter crap" I've got to call bullshit here. Two things:
1) In your libertarian view of the marketplace (and the view of a few others before you) you forget the incredible delta$ to acquire a new customer compared to the delta$ to hold on to a old customer. Saying that they have the "right" to damn well do whatever they want is like saying, "I'm the CEO, and if I say burn the factory to the ground, then burn it to the ground". Your board of directors will have your butt.
2) It isn't *really* "Their site, their forum, their goal, and their prerogative." Rather, it belongs to the stockholders. Everything they do has to be done with their responsibility to the stockholders in mind. Alienating customers is not going to maximize shareholder wealth.
How did he get the before photo? I don't know about you, but I don't go around taking screenshots of my desktop randomly... Did he start with the assumption that HP is evil and would therefore delete his comment and thus need the evidence?
I think the point is that corporate blogs can be (and will increasingly be) used as marketing tools and should be treated with the same skepticism that you'd treat an advertisement or PR release.
./ linked to a story about "media hits" and how "the suit is back" was one well done media campaign for The Men's Warehouse because so many "news" stories picked up the advertising and treated it like actual news.
A week or two ago
In the same article there was speculation that one reason blogs are so popular is that they are, for the most part, immune to the traditional media-manipulation processes that publicity companies have refined to an exact science for 'traditional' media.
It would appear that "corporate blogs" are a rather piss-poor attempt by the publicity companies to manipulate blog readers. It is too blatant for anyone to take seriously. But even when people like that democrat presidential candidate from vermont whose name I can't recall tried "astroturfing" some blogs by paying off the bloggers, it eventually came out (it did take a while though). On the other hand, the technology is still in its infancy, I'm sure we will eventually see "blog hits" that are so well executed that it takes a trained eye to recognize them as corporate shillage.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Leave a negative comment about Linux on /. and see how quickly you end up with a post modded to -1 troll.
Guess what. No one likes being criticized.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I find it astoundingly hypocritical how you could write two long paragraphs about how you, in essence, stole money from HP, then finish that off with a sig saying "Do the Right Thing". If you really did what you described in your story, that was -- at best -- dishonest. Doing "the Right Thing" would, of course, have been sending them the receipt for the modem you actually kept and used, in case you are too ethically challenged to be aware of that.
All of that is true, but sometimes the people at the top really *are* just that bad too.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
"While I agree with the parent's message in spirit, in practice it is incorrect to treat a corporation as monolithic."
Sure, in reality they aren't, but in reality it doesn't really matter. They were either allowed to do it (standing policy) or broke policy while doing it. But if someone does something in the name of their employer (a corp) it tends to become "corporate policy" regardless of the actual policy unless it is quickly and unequivocally dealt with.
This would probably fall under their external PR guidelines. Possibly customer relations. There is a textbook response for everything. For PR (aka anything negative, it is probably "no comment" and contact our PR rep in state X. For customer service, it is probably similarly scripted. While employees may not follow it in practice, they tend to be herded into line when it becomes public...
I personally don't like this Thomas Hawk, from this whole thing.
1) If you read his blog about it, he insults ALL IT professionals and tech support people in particular.
2) His post on HP's site was not well written.
3) He then expects slashdot to rally behind him.
Sure, Slashdot didn't post it before it was changed back, however he sought this avenue before that point.