Excited about this forum and looking forward to seeing it evolve: New user here with a general question: What are the guidelines as it pertains to pointing to company specific resources or even inviting a contributor who may work for a med device company? Regarding @TamaE 's very relevant discussion on Garmin trackers, I can think of someone who would be well-positioned to respond to this as he has explored a lot of options for individual training/exercise, but he also works for Dexcom, so is that then a no-go on the “public” forum?
Kia ora @KyleJ - that’s a very good question.
First up linking to or involving companies is fine & may be the best course of action for some posts.
However, we need to keep an eye out to make sure we don’t start to move into stealth (or not so stealth) advertising.
I have managed communities in the past where companies have behaved in ways which very much looked like advertising & beyond. The “beyond” bit was most often trying to paint competitors in a negative light.
However - in almost all cases the community instantly recognised the attempt at manipulation & called “B.S.”. For example - some random new user turned up & (pretending to be a consumer) start comparing a certain companies products favourably to competitors - it didn’t take long to identify the user as an employee of said company!
So tentatively yes, let’s involve companies/ employees - but monitor it in regards to “good faith” behaviour.
Does that answer your question?
(My apologies for the late response - my family got run over by a nasty flu, better now.)
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Yes, thank you. That makes sense. I do agree it can become tricky (from a perception standpoint) as things evolve so just wanted to make sure I understood the collective approach.
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