The other day, I stumbled across a conversation which I thought was pretty interesting. The question at hand was, “When should I call someone out“? There were many bloggers who joined in on the conversation offering up their opinions and suggestions and I thought I’d chime in as well.
This question hits home for me as I’ve been in a position where I have had to call someone out because they owed me money. After dealing with the individual in as many private ways as possible, I took the issue public and suffice to say, it made matters worst and didn’t solve anything. I thought that by going public, I would expose this schmuck who conned me out of $500.00 but all I ended up doing was losing friends in the process who didn’t want to be sucked into the situation. It would of been best for me to realize that I was never going to get my money back and leave it at that, but the thought of this guy scamming me played on my concious to the point where I felt I would feel justified if I smeared his name. The bottom line is, it didn’t work and I didn’t recieve my money.
As one of the bloggers in the conversation so rightly put it,
When you start throwing mud, everyone gets dirty.
I have one more story to share. After performing an interview on my podcast WordPress Weekly, a blogger who listened to the show considered it the worst interview he had ever listened to. Instead of calling the guy out, I took the high road and published a post asking my listeners if what the guy had said was true. I even linked to the guys blog post. Without telling my listeners to do so, they clicked on over to this guys site and gave him an earful. It was later discovered that he sensationalized the title of the blog post and didn’t exactly feel as if I performed the worst interview ever. But because I had taken the high road, I ended up in a much better position had I started to throw mud around.
My advice is to do whatever you can to pull the stick out of the gear behind the scenes without having the situation end up in the public light. Situations like these can turn into a firestorm and if you have been around the blogosphere once or twice, you’ll know that simple mishaps can turn into a world of uninformed, misguided trouble. If you do end up calling somebody out, I highly suggest reading up on Defamation as you wouldn’t want to end up in court, especially if it was for something that could of been solved in a much simpler way.
Ever feel like calling someone out using your blog as a soapbox? Let me know how you handled the situation in the comments.
Image taken by Cchrissy55 under Creative Commons
3 thoughts on “I’m Calling You Out!”
Who could forget? It was hardly your fault though. I imagine that is how every interviewer has felt about David Blaine.
Right on the money Andrew. By the way, do you remember which podcast I am referring to which contained the label of Worst Interview Ever?
I entirely agree that it is best to take the high ground. So often you read a post where someone is “calling out” someone else and it is no more than a playground rant. Sure it is good for traffic but frankly it makes that person look like an ass.
If you don’t understand a point of view then say so and explain your own point of view. If you think something is poorly explained or thought out then explain the reasons why. But it never helps to start name calling or getting personal.
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