Microsoft Taps Bloggers to Promote Longhorn 415
Tim writes "With Beta 1 of Longhorn less than two months away, Microsoft is looking at a new marketing tool to help promote its new Windows: bloggers. According to BetaNews, Microsoft's "Team 99" evangelism effort will be composed of bloggers that will become Microsoft's voice to the masses. Robert Scoble said Team 99 was once secret, but has been revived and Microsoft is now accepting nominations. It's nice to see Microsoft recognizing the power of blogs, but the move is likely going to draw accusations that Redmond is trying to buy off bloggers to hype Longhorn."
Free Advertising (Score:2, Interesting)
How many Slashdot accounts? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Weird names (Score:1, Interesting)
We all know that coders are fond of stupid code names, but such stupidity should generally not be foisted on the standard user of the product.
Re:Astroturf, Anyone? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's quite noticeable, but not very effective. There are a number of users who post straight-out pro-Microsoft comments without any hint of irony. Such as "people hack IE only because it is popular", or "Microsoft make excellent software".
Then, there are the astro-moderators, who will mod-down obvious anti-Microsoft comments. These are quite common but usually get hammered out in meta-moderation.
Lastly, there are the trolls who take delight in disrupting the serious ongoing conversations at Slashdot. I'd not be surprised to discover that some of these are sponsored by Microsoft.
Yes, Microsoft reads Slashdot.
Remember "Team OS/2" (Score:3, Interesting)
Hey, check this out! (Score:2, Interesting)
Kinda reminds me of the way McDonalds pays rappers for rapping about the big mac. MS will pay you for writing propaganda about longhorn in your blog. Is nothing sacred?
This isn't too surprising (Score:3, Interesting)
What we were doing wasn't all that sophisticated (we had an evangelist program as well, which who were far better than us at promoting our messages). There were several viral advertising firms out there that were posting in fake blogs, in real blogs, on multiple forums using fake ids, etc.
While you could argue that viral marketing of this sort is unethical or at least questionable, it really is no different than paying people to walk around with your product in public. Online viral marketing, and placement in a blog, is just another form of PR placement.
Of course there is an ethical question to be answered if blogs are truly a form of news protected by the laws and practices of journalists. If that's the case than these blogs are practicing yellow journalism, which would then throw into question their role as independent journalists (then again if you can find me a 100% untainted all the time news source these days I'd be pretty impressed (especially if they have over 100 readers)).
Will Blog For Cash... (Score:5, Interesting)
I mean, really. How hard is it to find ONE photogenic woman in a company the size of Microsoft? Hell, Apple used a LOT of folks in their ads... And they didn't look like models either (nor did their words sound like PR text).
Yup, look to a LOT of "Longhorn allows me to do things the way that make me more productive" blah blah blah...
Re:Free Advertising (Score:1, Interesting)
Take this example:
Circa 1994, I am in a Phoenix, Arizona computer store named Software City on 7th St. A female walks in and asks a sales person which word processor she should purchase. The sales person offers Word (even those WordPerfect was the leading program at the time and far superior in functionality).
The female says thank you and tells the sales person that she was from Microsoft Corporate and then gave the sales person gift certificate for offering Microsoft Word first.
Was the better product offered? No. Was the sales person rewarded for giving the Microsoft view? IMHO, yes.
Blogging down the tubes just like print media (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Don't forget... (Score:2, Interesting)
This is stupid (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Mistake (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Is this the same Microsoft... (Score:1, Interesting)
Microsoft had a legitimate reason for not allowing those screenshots to be displayed (something about unregistered patents if I remember corectly).
If I'm not mistaken even some of the guys putting the screenshots up later acknowledged Microsoft had a legitimate reason.
I don't get it, do you guys realy think Microsoft is so stupid/evil that they will give up free publicity just to prevent someone who wants to see the longhorn pics from getting them, for no good reason?
Re:Astroturf, Anyone? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll ad another:
The "XP is only crashes becuase of all the different hardware it supports" astroturfer.
the completly miss the fact that FreeBSD, NetBSD and Linux support most of the x86 hardware that XP does --- AND PowerPC AND Sparc AND Aplha AND Mips etc....
*BSD and Linux manage to be stable, why can XP??? Hmmmmm...
Re:Linux isn't proprietary... (Score:1, Interesting)
This is just a ploy to dim Tiger's limelight.
Re:Longhorn Rocks! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Bill Gates' blog... (Score:3, Interesting)
Today at the airport I saw a $100 bill, but left it lying there. It's just not worth it.
Bzzt. Bill is the kind of guy who would pick it up and put it in his pocket. In Bob Cringeley's Accidental Empires there's a good example of this sort of thing where he waits in line at a 7-11 to get his discount stamps and gets ribbed by the cashier to the tune of "come back when you make your first million."
Bill was already a billionaire by then.
The possibility of real engagement. (Score:5, Interesting)
There was no NDA.
There was no attempt to encourage people to be pro-Microsoft or even actively promote the product. I certainly wasn't, I was more than ready to highlight the shortcomings of the products, and they still kept me on their list and sent me units to try on.
And most of all, they didn't just talk... they listened as well.
Three things struck me:
First, all the Palm users immediately got together and beamed all their contact info to each other. The Pocket PC users mostly didn't know how to do it, beaming was difficult and the handhelds were generally larger and less comfortable to use and even the Microsoft people on the handheld team didn't tend to have theirs with them.
Second, getting the mail set up on the LAN they were demoing on was really hard. By the second try people were saying things like "this isn't supposed to be rocket science, and besides, we're all supposed to be rocket scientists".
Third, the handwriting recognition was clumsy. It required a lot more strokes and a lot more tries to reliably recognise text, compared to Graffiti.
The really amazing thing, the thing that made me a total fan of Beth Goza and Derek Brown was thet the next version of the Pocket PC software actually fixed all these problems. Not all the changes were improvements, and not all the problems we pointed out were fixed, but so many of them were I was stunned. In fact, since Palm replaced Graffiti with Jot the Pocket PC does a better job of implementing Graffiti than Palm OS does.
Unfortunately, while they made many changes the Pocket PC still has all the deeper flaws that I wrote about back then. Oh well, this isn't about the Pocket PC. This is about Microsoft.
What was key with the PPCWB shindig is that Microsoft set up a two-way discussion with us, and didn't try and control what we said in it or to other people. This wan't an "Astroturf" campaign, it was a real engagement with the community, and they got a huge win out of NOT creating a conduit for synthetic adulation.
Microsoft's done it once. Can they do it again?
Tiger effect (Score:2, Interesting)
And I am not even a Mac user...