David Chao the WebEx employee updated his blog yesterday. David runs a personal web conferencing blog, and wrote a blog review of Dimdim, a competitor in the web conferencing space.
David had not published a disclosure about his employment directly on his blog or in the review post, plus he had not published a comment from Kevin Micalizzi, the community manager of Dimdim. Kevin had commented on the post because he found David Chao's post to contain several inaccuracies about the servers Dimdim uses to support clients. David Chao had suggested Dimdim uses Amazon.com servers 100% of the time when Dimdim has their own servers, while clients do use Amazon.com servers it is only at their own request. David Chao had based his comments about Dimdim's servers on a Mashable article that referenced a Dimdim client using Amazon.com.
David Chao has updated his blog to display a disclosure about his employment with Cisco within the side navigation and in the original review post.
In addition to publishing Kevin's comment, David posted a comment in his Dimdim review post stating that the facts about Dimdim servers were inaccurate. David also gave a more detailed explanation of why he did not publish Kevin’s comment on his blog in a comment on this blog PR Communications.
In addition to the discussion with Kevin Micalizzi from Dimdim, David Chao had also criticized the Amazon.com EC2 servers. In response a blogger had commented on his blog. David had then got into an exchange with the blogger via email, which he published on his blog (hopefully with the blogger’s permission!)
I think what’s interesting about the incident with David Chao is that through community persuasion we’ve been able to make helpful suggestions about disclosure, publishing comments and responding to them that gave David enough information so that he has changed his blogging practices. This case study is an example of how situations turn around once people, companies and brands understand the value of engagement and realize that there’s nothing to fear but everything to gain.
David had not published a disclosure about his employment directly on his blog or in the review post, plus he had not published a comment from Kevin Micalizzi, the community manager of Dimdim. Kevin had commented on the post because he found David Chao's post to contain several inaccuracies about the servers Dimdim uses to support clients. David Chao had suggested Dimdim uses Amazon.com servers 100% of the time when Dimdim has their own servers, while clients do use Amazon.com servers it is only at their own request. David Chao had based his comments about Dimdim's servers on a Mashable article that referenced a Dimdim client using Amazon.com.
David Chao has updated his blog to display a disclosure about his employment with Cisco within the side navigation and in the original review post.
In addition to publishing Kevin's comment, David posted a comment in his Dimdim review post stating that the facts about Dimdim servers were inaccurate. David also gave a more detailed explanation of why he did not publish Kevin’s comment on his blog in a comment on this blog PR Communications.
In addition to the discussion with Kevin Micalizzi from Dimdim, David Chao had also criticized the Amazon.com EC2 servers. In response a blogger had commented on his blog. David had then got into an exchange with the blogger via email, which he published on his blog (hopefully with the blogger’s permission!)
I think what’s interesting about the incident with David Chao is that through community persuasion we’ve been able to make helpful suggestions about disclosure, publishing comments and responding to them that gave David enough information so that he has changed his blogging practices. This case study is an example of how situations turn around once people, companies and brands understand the value of engagement and realize that there’s nothing to fear but everything to gain.
