To build on a previous post on our blog about Sermo.com – a social networking site for licensed physicians. I was fortunate enough to be part of a great discussion with CEO and founder of Sermo – Daniel Palestrant today; where he brought to my attention an interesting story that has been unfolding in the past 10 days.

It all started on September 20th when one of the authors of the Medgadget blog posted a “breaking” article titled “Guide to hacking into Social Networks for Doctors”. The article provided a step by step guide on how users could impersonate a physician to become a member of this type of gated community – citing Sermo.com as the best known social network of this kind.

On the same day, the author of the article joined Sermo.com and posted the article on the site as well. Contrary to [what I’m sure] the reaction he thought he would get – not only did Sermo not have to do damage control, the community was up in arms over the post – showing their loyalty to the site. As Dr. Palestrant put it beautifully, “an online community becomes a community… when it’s willing to defend itself” which is what has happened in this case. The users were not so much angry at the content of the article itself (it’s helpful to know the loopholes that could be exploited within the site), after all, Sermo is still growing and constantly improving itself. The real scathing issue is the way the author went about disclosing that information. Members of the community wondered why the author didn’t go directly to Sermo Corporate about this issue, keeping the problem relatively private so that it could be dealt with, as opposed to posting it on the public web, essentially providing easy access to a guide on how to impersonate a physician to anyone and everyone.

The more the author tried to defend himself, the angrier the community got. What the author failed to realize is that all the physicans aren’t angry on behalf of Sermo or Dr. Palestrant himself, they are supporting Sermo as loyalists. The author is attacking Sermo while it’s the users who are mad at him. The author has written a few rebuttles on his blog, including an open letter to Dr. Palestrant which seems to be adding fuel to the fire. The community is so angry that there has been talk of contacting the California Medical Board to get the author’s licence revoked, boycotting the medgadget blog itself and the site’s advertisers. Here, ladies and gentlemen is self organization at its best. Sermo has done the smart thing and has stayed out of all of this, but they really haven’t had the need to get involved. Sermo has developed a loyal group of users, who see the value in the system and who are capable of sifting through the information and picking up on what they can trust, while sifting through the (uncommon) junk.