Company Representatives - The Big Red Cheese?
Jeffrey S Mitchell suggests "1. Allow and indeed encourage companies to participate in their own threads... for free.
2. Clearly label company personnel with red tags after their names saying "Company Rep" or somesuch."
I'm not excited about free accounts... I think that Company Reps should pay as much as anyone else... I presume their company can afford it or they shouldn't be here at all. Besides, free anything encouranges fraud... why bother.
I do think it would save some trouble, if the SI administration could verify that an account really did represent a particular company... one of the silly tricks that's fooled a few newbies has been people claiming to be what they aren't.... I'm not sure how this particular verification can be done... letterhead is easy to produce, and the worst kind of unauthorized disgruntled insider-oids have access to it late at night, especially at a small company.
On the other hand, it's not worth much. I'd expect a far-thinking Internet-aware company to be posting all kinds of press releases and other disclosed materials, on its web site. While even FBN manages to have a web site, it's possible to do some checking to see who owns a particular site, and so get a small sense of verification that the site is what it's supposed to be. And then many of the things that an official rep could do could be done by anyone, just by posting a link to the latest release.
If a company is doing that, then the only job left for an Official Rep is to start stupid fights, and threaten lawsuits. This is probably better left to certified mail, or at least private email.
Not just FTEL....
I, personally, am disturbed that various companies, in this forum and others, have taken to threatening those who criticize their stock. Frankly, to me, it makes those companies look like they don't have much real to show for themselves. There is all kinds of hype on the net... both positive and negative.... and some of it is malicious. But companies that try to halt their critics, instead of just letting them be proven false, risk appearing to be in a delicate condition, whether they actually are or not.
Trying to measure the benefit of speaking out here by looking at the response to postings such as #reply-5166024 is probably the wrong method. For every eager (read already long, and hoping) participant in the thread who says something encouraging, there may be more non-participants who are making the easy decision to skip or even short that company. Which they would probably not do if there was just a critic or two.
Just my opinion, of course.
Dick |
