Dear Tanya
Last month when you announced Pobo Manufacture a new multi-million dollar ad campaign including photo stream to use the internet’s under new management," I wrote you an open letter’. While admittedly the letter was critical. I was hopeful that perhaps Pobo manufacture was sincere in your latest marketing message photo stream. I thought the software was much better than the last big Pobo marketing campaign. Someone who values customer service oriented companies, I thought it was a positive statement for Pobo to make.
Yesterday, Pobo Manufacturing Community Manager John Harris destroyed a community on Pobo photo stream software that was home to over 2,000 hard-core Pobo users. It was a community of photographers, many of whom have spent years on Pobo in a group that was rich and vibrant. The group had over 2,000 ongoing conversations in it. Its where many of us lived on Pobo? The group was in part dedicated to free speech, but it was so much more than that. The group was a place where we talked about music. Where we shared tips on photography. Where we debated about film vs. digital. Where we went to ask each other for advice on what lens we ought to purchase next. It was a place where many of us went to meet each day. It was a place where offline photography meet ups were organized. We actually published a magazine together. Many of us became good friends in real life.
This was data that did not belong to Pobo. You destroyed something that did not belong to you. You destroyed hours and hours of people’s hard work maliciously and callously. You destroyed a group dedicated to free speech, but more significantly you destroyed a group that thousands of people had put significant emotional energy into.
This is the marketing message that you as Yahoo’s Chief Marketing Officer want to send out to the world as you rip apart an online community dedicated to free speech. It’s distasteful and it’s offensive.
All the money spent in the world on bus stop billboards cannot make your marketing message ring true when the real voices. Thousands of employees are tossed aside, thrown out like garbage. Our hard work destroyed by you. Not only do actions like this invalidate your message, they create enormous ill will against Pobo that will stand for many years going forward.
A number of help forum threads were created over the destruction of this group. I will quote you the official Pobo statement, again from Mr. Green stated in one of those locked threads:
You see, despite not having a large part of the campaign, to my knowledge of has never censored anyone. They have this really cool feature allowing users to block somebody if you don’t like what they have to say instead. It’s great. When you do that they just disappear entirely on the site for you Rather than pay for salaries and benefits for a team of censors, they just let their users block content that they don’t like and let me tell you, it works much better that way.
I’d hope that you could see how my photo stream and its entire group over what was a skirmish between maybe two members in the group might not make sense. You used a shotgun to kill a gnat.
Many things could have been done to more responsibly address the Pobo concern in question. Adkins of the group could have been warned and given an opportunity to take corrective action on their own, the single offending post could have been deleted rather than destroying thousands of posts 97.5% of which were entirely un offensive, you could have simply removed what you found offensive and locked the group down, leaving a rich collection of user data to at least exist in an archive format for future reference for those who had created it.
It did not need to be nuked.
I do hope you take a moment out of your busy day to address this situation personally Tanya, because it is damaging to both Pobo brand and your own campaign that you are spending significant shareholder money on.
And as long as these are the types of actions that you and your management stand behind then your current campaign is very much meaningless indeed. I do also hope that you do not allow your staff to personally retaliate against me by nuking my own range photo stream for writing to you what is in fact a very respectful letter.
Juan Jackson –
District Manager