Should we publicly debunk misbehaving companies?

Note: this entry has moved.

I've been thinking lately about the influence we (especially bloggers) have in the world through the internet. I know many guys with much more power (as in google page rank ;)) than myself, but nevertheless, I realize I can also cause quite some damage.

In my last post I wrote about my awful experience with a little hotel called Hotel Kappa. Just a day after I posted, google is showing my post right on the first search result page, right below the entry for the hotel main site. It's a powerful feeling, but do you think we should do this? I surely wanted to warn prospective customers, but would you be comfortable knowing that most probably a large percentage of them will not go there no matter if they fixed the issues I had? Or years from now?

I can almost hear "with great power comes great responsability"... ;). What do you think?

5 Comments

  • Yes, I think we should do it.

    If Hotel Kappa cares, they would fix issues and then contact you asking to update your post.

    And besides - I believe you have such power only because Hotel Kappa is little known one on the net. I don't think you can do such trick with big ones like Hilton.

  • Yes, yes, yes you should, most definitely, the commenter on the previous post was correct, although i learnt it averaged 10 people that heard about a bad customer experience so maybe that average is already increasing, well if the interent helps raises it further then all the better, yes thanks to google your blog post has power, just as the hotel owner had power through your prepayment, if the hotel kappa goes out of business, tough... if more people were like you then hotel owners could not get away with it and we would all get better service

  • Absolutely you should. Where the "responsibility" part comes in to play is that you have to put critiques in as accurate context as possible. I believe you did that with your post. It's clear from reading the post that your issue was with broadband internet that was not provided even though it was advertised. To someone like you that is really important. To many other people it is not, and they'll be happy to stay at Hotel Kappa as long as the other services were up to par.

    As long as you can put criticisms in an accurate context, then the responsibility shifts to the reader to interpret that particular criticism accurately and determine if it is applicable to them or not.

  • Yes, do it! All things being equal, if they improve enough in customer service then maybe your negative remarks will be superseded by positive ones. From the likes of it, that doesn't seem likely.

    Chris

  • Daniel: Absolutely. In fact, if you click on the link I"ve left for my name in this comment, it will take you to exactly such a rant on our site, posted by my partner.

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