You are a blogger who has written a review about a recently launched mobile phone. You write a comprehensive review and present the pros and cons of this phone to your readers. You are trying to present maximum information to help them decide whether this phone is right for them or not.
You are not related to the phone company at all, and are not getting paid to write this review and in fact, you are not even promoting the phone.
This is a new company and its website is not very popular. When people search on the web for the phone, they invariably land on your website and read your review. It makes them think that you are in some way associated with the phone. In some cases, they even think that this is the website of the phone company.
I am one such person. I ordered the phone about a month ago and have the paid full price for it. For some reason the phone has not been delivered to me yet, and not only that, I haven’t received any acknowledgement for my purchase.
I reach your website and write in a comment asking you why my phone wasn’t delivered and when you are going to ship it to me.
The comment is under moderation and you figure that you could help me by pointing me towards the real website of the phone company.
Will you delete my comment and / or respond to me and help me out, or ignore it because you get too many such unrelated requests and don’t have the time?
What will you do?
Thanks for all your comments. This is based on something I am facing these days, and your suggestions helped me decide what to do. Will have that post later next week.
It would be ethical to point the reader in the right direction. Even though you may not have enough information you can just point in the right direction and the reader may get his or her issue resolved and come back to your site again…
Definitely help out if I could. I really like these posts and especially if they turn into a discussion 🙂
I would respond and redirect leaving the original comment on the blog in case somebody else arrived thinking they had reached the product’s site.
1) Reply
2) Update your review with a disclaimer stating you have zero connection with company and the review is merely your personal opinion (which no one will believe. They will believe you are doing affiliate marketing.)
3) The only ethical consideration here is your willingness to take the time to reply. And you ought to reply because you set this problem in motion without that disclaimer.
I would respond to the comment and not delete it. I would mention the link / contact details of the company which you need to contact in order to get your grievance addressed properly as well as mention the fact that I am in no way connected to the product or the company and that this is just an “review based post”. By doing this (in a public manner on the blog itself) I would also be informing my readers that I am in no way earning any revenue for the said article and would also be helpful in providing them links to the actual group / company to which they can contact directly for any concerns / issues they might have with the said product.
I would try to help if I could; but if the blogger is truly un-related to the product and just wrote a post about it, there may be very little they could do.