As some have already stated, Bob as "CEO" has the right to revoke membership to whoever he wants. (Maybe this is true maybe its not. Without knowing their bylaws or rules I am just working under the assumption that he can.) The fact that this Society has a President/CEO is in and of itself a major red flag to me. Have you looked at the Society Officers page on the LAOCAS website? There are a total of 37 officers! 13 Vice Presidents, 12 Senior Vice Presidents, 9 Executive Vice presidents, 1 Senior Executive Vice President, 1 Chairman and 1 President and CEO. With titles like that I get the impression that the Leadership of this Society needs to feel important and will likely favor relationships with industry representatives and store owners over their members. As long as they can rub elbows with people they perceive as important they don't care what they try to peddle to their members. And anything that could jeopardize those relationships is deemed unacceptable.
In this case I would have loved to see Bob reach out to Mark and make with a proposal to redo the demo at another meeting or event. perhaps something like this,
Mark,
It has come to my attention that you have posted information on you Blog about a recent power cable demo put on at our last event. I have read the article and feel that the methods used and claims made by you might be taken negatively by the presenter. A better course of action might have been to address the speaker directly with your concerns and findings at the end of his demo so he may attempt to defend himself or product. If negative feedback from our members is posted without at least giving the other party a chance to defend themselves it might influence our society's ability to offer factory representation in the future.
Having said that, I would very much like to know if our members are being duped into buying things through deception. I propose that we invite the vendor back to another event and ask that the demonstration be redone. If we find any evidence of foul play at that time we can address it with him then. If we want to do this right we should also be using calibrated equipment to test for SPL levels. If we are to make accusations and cite technical data we should do our due diligence and insure the data we collect is valid. Do you have the proper instrumentation needed for a precision test or should I have some sourced?
El Capitan Bob
NOTE: THE ABOVE PASSAGE IS NOT A QUOTATION!
As someone who is tasked occasionally with defending his company's products from erroneous clams made by the un/misinformed I would gladly accept to redo the demonstration if asked and help with any data acquisition needed. If you truly believe in your products this should not be an issue. If a manufacturer would not agree to another demo or allow tests to be conducted during that demo to check validity of claims made, I'm not sure I would want them to be part of my events.
Mr. Levi, If it so happens that you do read this, know that this could have been handled much, much better. I would be willing to bet that a lot of your Laocas members are members on AK as well (or at least lurkers). They will undoubtedly stumble across this thread and you will probably catch some backlash. In the future, do yourself a favor, take a deep breath and try to approach your issues with a level head. One more thing. to quote you in your response to our thread "I was not there." if you were not there then how can you say that there was "no problem with the presentation"? What did your investigation consist of? Asking a few other members (dare I say friends?) that might have been in attendance? Hardly scientific...
