Recently I posted a comment on a blog that was politely taking the blogger to task. See, I had read his subject line incorrectly thinking he was overreacting to the topic at hand. This blog was his personal blog, but the content was related to his work. He clearly identified himself as being an employee of the company he works for.
Rather than respond in the blog comments, the blogger emailed me to ask why I had posted what I had posted. To be clear, my comment wasn’t aggressive or rude.
When I responded to the blogger with my clarification of the point I was making, he replied that he had taken the comment down since we had "resolved the issue".
To tell the truth, I felt a bit put out by that action. I felt like he didn’t value the discussion because it made him look less than perfect, or because it might somehow reduce his "expert status". For me personally, I would have thought him more the expert if he had simply addressed the issue in the comments. It would have showed me that he was so very confident in his abilities that he didn’t have to take it to email.
Yet another reason that I advise clients to delete comments only when there is a significant problem such as profanity, threats, being radically off-topic, and so on. After all, how you respond to your critics is often more telling than how you respond to your supporters.
