OK, so no surprise here but I'm really disappointed, ney, amazed with her response.

1. This is someone in PR, doesn't she know enough to brush you off better than that?

2. Totally agree about your points of negative comments. I always, always advise that you ONLY delete comments that are clearly inappropriate, and inappropriate has been determined in advance.

3. Well, if the industry council gives approval....

4. Talk about not getting what's happening in the world around her. She seems like a good option for a social media training session. Send her a copy of the latest issue of Time!

5. Yes, it's "obvious" why it's uncomfortable to post negative comments. It's also "obvious" why you're going to be unemployed in the next few years.

6. The best (well, worst, really) part of this discussion is the organization in question. It'd be one thing if we were talking about an insurance firm. But a tourist organization, set up solely to interact with the outside world... yikes!

Each year, Visit Florida asks the Legislature for more money. This year will be no different. But the new leadership in Tallahassee should take notice.

BTW - who is the target audience for the site? I've never heard of it before. Is their target Web-savvy residents? If so, users will see it as propaganda. Is the target non-savvy users? If so, they won't visit in the first place. It seems like a misguided campaign.

Finally, from a public benefit standpoint, I want to know which destinations my fellow residents liked, and which they did not enjoy. That is what reviews are for. For example, if I see that most users enjoyed Siesta Key but some residents did not enjoy Bartow, then that helps me (a taxpayer and therefore a funder of Visit Florida!) make an informed decision.

PR corporations are screwing up, like Edelman, but they are answerable to clients/shareholders/the public. Who is going to hold a state tourism agency accountable for poor social media practices?

When the industry gets more established guidelines and gets used to following those guidelines, like transparency mentioned above, then we can go after people in government organizations who don't get it. Till then, we have a lot of work to do making our own firms do it right.

Josh,

Thanks for the e-mail this morning. I thought I'd post here for the benefit of the discussion. In response to the questions you posed earlier to Vanessa Welter, I’d like to provide some clarification. But first, please accept my apologies for what unfortunately came across as a terse response from the organization.

More to the point of this blog topic, you’re absolutely correct in pointing out that there aren’t many negative comments posted on the Floridian site (floridians.VISITFLORIDA.com). But I can tell you that it is not because either the VISIT FLORIDA organization or our web publisher have deleted negative comments to provide some sanitized view of the Florida vacation experience.

In fact, the only content supplied by users that has not been posted has been content that we deemed too “P.R.” and therefore suspect as to whether a real user supplied it; content that was so unspecific that it provided little value to the site (e.g. “I love Florida for sun and fun.”); or content that was unrelated to the site’s mission (for example, one user wanted to tell us about his trip to Florida to undergo dialysis – but the site is geared to Floridians sharing getaway information – not out-of-state visitors who are seeking our medical facilities).

Our understanding of the social networking phenomenon and user-supplied content is that open commentary must be embraced to be meaningful, and to create the community of users we want to have on the site. As such, we’ve worked very closely with our publisher, Miles Media, to establish guidelines for comments and content posted on the site (in fact, they're posted for all to see). You’ve listed these guidelines on your blog previously, and we have not deviated from these “best practices” guidelines which are similar to those used by Tripadvisor and many other travel sites with user-supplied content. We have not and will not censor user comments.

I think the most likely reason that the site has few negative comments is that we’ve encouraged user submissions through a contest – and users probably think their chances of winning are higher if their submission is positive rather than negative. This is only a first step for us, however, and we fully expect that user supplied content will appear on both this Floridian site and on other VISIT FLORIDA websites (including our main consumer site, VISITFLORIDA.com) in more varied and fully realized forms in the near future. I welcome further dialogue with you as our sites develop over time.

Dale:

Thanks for the comment and clarification. Hopefully you can spread some of the best practices you know so well to the rest of the Visit Florida staff.

You know, Bob gets me thinking.... are state/government funded entities obligated to post all content (save the clearly "bad" content)?

Jake, they're not required to POST all content but they are required to PROVIDE all submitted content upon request.