After we explained the article (Hikvision VMS Beats Genetec, Milestone and Verkada In "Gartner Peer Insights"), he deleted his comments, but there are some interesting lessons about dealing with social media posts.
We shared that article on LinkedIn recently, and a person responded:
We responded by asking him why he thought so, given our track record of exposing PRC entities' human rights abuses, which has become so well known that it has been covered in profiles by The Atlantic, Wired, and Time.
He responded that we were marketing for them:
Which we responded by asking if he had read the first paragraph of the post, sharing it:
While Gartner is one of the oldest and most well-known names in IT, its lack of expertise in video surveillance and intent on being found in search results show in its "Peer Insights" VMS Market ranking Hikvision's iVMS-5200 over virtually all other entrants, including Genetec, Milestone, and Verkada.
After that, he deleted his comments.
One thought is about titles / headlines. The one we used was factually focused - Hikvision VMS Beats Genetec, Milestone and Verkada In "Gartner Peer Insights" without an explicit disclaimer or emotive language. An alternative title could have been Horrible Hikvision VMS Wrongly Beats Genetec, Milestone, and Verkada In Bogus Gartner Peer Insights.
Titles/headlines are tough since one is trying to convey a lot in only a few words and slight changes in words can significantly impact tone or understanding. We aim to be more factually focused with titles, though, as this showed, it resulted in an industry professional falsely concluding we were promoting Hikvision.
As for social media posting, he probably would have been better off spending 30 seconds before posting or posting a question before making such an obviously false allegation. I think though this incident ended relatively well, he deleted it after we clarified, and we are not calling him out personally.
Social media is still relatively new and all of us are trying to learn how to optimally engage. And while chaos on social media (e.g., the wild ride of Twitter/X over the last few years show) is still real, I am hopeful that we will all learn how to better engage.
