HP Gets a Clue

UPDATED

Thomas Hawk posted a civil but negative comment on a Hewlett-Packard blog. HP deleted it. Hawk raised hell, and got noticed. David Gee, the HP blog host, reversed his decision.

In an e-mail this morning, Hawk said:

I think all in all HP did the right thing. Everyone deserves second chances and I’m optimistic that we will see more responsible corporate blogging from HP going forward.

Companies should think carefully about using comments on their blogs though. Unlike an individual blogger, corporate bloggers have additional constituencies to think about -- namely shareholders and company employees.

I always thought that when you were with the Merc that you did a pretty good job managing comments. Certainly comments do need to be moderated and there are things that need to be censored (spam, racist and offensive language, vulgarity, etc.). But smart companies should realize that simply deleting critical comments is not smart business. You might get away with it sometimes but there is a chance that you won’t -- and if you don’t, the fallout can be much worse. Credibility is a really important thing.

This example also points out two other things.

1. The blogosphere has put tremendous power through the collective into the hands of even the smallest bloggers. You are already keenly aware of this. The ability to get something printed at Slashdot and the ensuing traffic is something that is new and it is real power that smart bloggers and consumers now have. And whether it is Engadget or Gizmodo or Slashdot or Boing Boing or Instapundit or Dan Gillmor, the big blogs really are pretty accessible in a lot of ways to little guys who know how to pitch things right.

The tech blogging community also is pretty tight and pretty fast. Although I think Mark Cuban disagreed with me on my post, within an hour of my posting it and emailing Mark he responded back with his own thoughts through personal email. Robert Scoble put a link up on the story this evening.

2. It shows that corporations still need a lot of work in developing best practices blogging standards. There are already companies like Cymfony (who I suspect was an unnamed company that I once called out in a comment on your blog) that claim to help corporations best deal with the blogosphere. Hopefully these companies do so in a truly constructive and positive way. Open dialog, respectful conversation and transparency will best benefit even the largest of corporations in the end. Robert Scoble has shown this at Microsoft and other companies would be wise to figure out blogging and how best to use it constructively.

Update and corrected: As noted in comments, David Gee says someone else deleted the post and he put it back up.

Comments

[Don Marti]

As long as people are interested in Media Center PCs and being honest with customers, how about putting up a list of which functionality the Media Center PC's DRM blocks, and which it allows? For example, it will record TV shows, and it has a DVD burner. Can you use those two features together to archive a show you "taped" off the air?

Arbitrary restrictions plus lack of pre-sales info equals future support issues.

[Thomas Hawk]

I've never had a show that I could not burn to DVD with MCE. I've also never had a show that I could not copy over my network for remote viewing on my laptop off site.

For all the talk of Microsoft and DRM, very little of it appears to have made it's way into the MCE product.

This could change when/if we see cable or satellite HDTV support.

I have found the portability of media to be excellent with MCE and would recommend this feature.

[Jeff Clavier]

Just for the record, David gee explains in this slashdot comment that he did not remove the comment, someone else did, and he ended up putting it back... and dealing with the situation over the week-end.