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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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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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.