How to deal with Company Promotion

Question

On this site in particular, we do need to attract experts and professionals in industry. Unfortunately, self-promotion is frowned upon.

See this question (and review the edits) : What type of concrete sealer to use to prevent frost heaves in my driveway?

The problem here is that the answer is REALLY GOOD. This is exactly the type of expert we are trying to attract. However, we need to allow some form of promotion to exist here in order to make it worth their time.

I would suggest allowing blatant self-promotion in the profile, and then allowing a "See my profile for my company information." as the only promotional text in the answer body.

Answer 1

The answer in its current form is just fine.

The poster has declared their affiliation and removed the link from the answer. They have their web site linked to in their profile which is exactly the right thing to do. In fact there's nothing wrong with using their website/company name as their profile name, so "blatant self-promotion" is already allowed (and in fact encouraged).

As long as we're nice about asking people to remove unnecessary links and declaring affiliations and quick at dealing with real spam we should be OK.

Answer 2

If removing the link makes the answer worse then the link should stay. Link + disclaimer is fine as long as readers know the affiliation. In the ideal case the the person answering would list their product + disclaimer + competitors, but I don't think editing the post to remove the link is beneficial if it actually makes the answer less useful.

Suppose I was a blogger and I had a blog post from a year ago that has the perfect answer to this question, but I wrote far too much in that blog post for a Q/A site. If I were to post my answer with a paragraph or 2 explaining things concisely, but then say "For those masochistic souls who want to read more on this you can go here link to my blog" then that would be an example of self promotion that actually makes the answer better. In that case, and this one, I would argue for keeping the information with a disclaimer or at least noting that it's your personal site.