Cisco WebEx Blogger Deletes Competitor's Comment
September 25, 2009
David Chao the author of a personal blog about web conferencing recently wrote a post reviewing Dimdim, a web conferencing company based here in Massachusetts. His review was not all that positive, and in addition, David did not reveal his affiliation with Cisco/WebEx in his post about Dimdim, Webex is a competitor to Dimdim. According to David's linkedin.com profile he is the Manager for North America/Canada Sales within WebEx's Collaboration Software Group.
Kevin Micalizzi, Dimdim's Online Community Manager, responded to David's post in the comment section of the post, but the comment was removed several hours later. Apparently David Chao had a few of his facts wrong about Dimdim. David had suggested that Dimdim's reliance on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) computing infrastructure was a risk to customers. However, as Kevin Micalizzi details in his blog post on the Dimdim blog, Dimdim does not use Amazon.com's service, Dimdim uses their own servers.
I wrote a post about standards in social media yesterday and while at the #IceSocial tweet up I organized last night. Kevin Micalizzi, the Community Manager from Dimdim, the featured guest speaker at the event, told me about David Chao's post and how his comment had been removed from David’s post.
Writing about competitors is perfectly acceptable in blogging and social media. I think the Boeing blog has done a good job of defending their airplane technology against AirBus on the Boeing blog. Yes the bias is there, but Randy at Boeing is very open about his role at Boeing and that he is a competitor to Airbus. I think the blog articles about differences in competitive strategy between the two aeronautical companies on the Boeing blog bring passion to the blog, and I've enjoyed reading many of the posts. Funnily enough I had referenced Ian Lurie’s post about bad business blogging practices in relation to the Boeing blog’s competitor content strategy in an earlier post.
In checking out David Chao’s blog, he looks like an experienced blogger; therefore I'm sure he has made a slight oversight in not revealing he is a WebEx employee in his post. Though David does provide a prominent link to his LinkedIn.com profile, where you can easily determine he is a WebEx employee.
Kevin Micalizzi, Dimdim's Online Community Manager, responded to David's post in the comment section of the post, but the comment was removed several hours later. Apparently David Chao had a few of his facts wrong about Dimdim. David had suggested that Dimdim's reliance on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) computing infrastructure was a risk to customers. However, as Kevin Micalizzi details in his blog post on the Dimdim blog, Dimdim does not use Amazon.com's service, Dimdim uses their own servers.
I wrote a post about standards in social media yesterday and while at the #IceSocial tweet up I organized last night. Kevin Micalizzi, the Community Manager from Dimdim, the featured guest speaker at the event, told me about David Chao's post and how his comment had been removed from David’s post.
Writing about competitors is perfectly acceptable in blogging and social media. I think the Boeing blog has done a good job of defending their airplane technology against AirBus on the Boeing blog. Yes the bias is there, but Randy at Boeing is very open about his role at Boeing and that he is a competitor to Airbus. I think the blog articles about differences in competitive strategy between the two aeronautical companies on the Boeing blog bring passion to the blog, and I've enjoyed reading many of the posts. Funnily enough I had referenced Ian Lurie’s post about bad business blogging practices in relation to the Boeing blog’s competitor content strategy in an earlier post.
In checking out David Chao’s blog, he looks like an experienced blogger; therefore I'm sure he has made a slight oversight in not revealing he is a WebEx employee in his post. Though David does provide a prominent link to his LinkedIn.com profile, where you can easily determine he is a WebEx employee.
I also hope the deletion of Kevin's comment clarifying some errors in David's original post was an oversight, and that we will see a reposting of the comment, and a good response from David.
10/11 Update: David Chao has updated his blog, giving a disclosure about his employment with Cicso, he published Kevin's comments, and updated the original post.