Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Taps Bloggers to Promote Longhorn
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."
Well, it is free advertising and people would rather read blogs for an opinion on a product, than read some flash-ad. I know I would. Especially with the open-source world, that's how I hear about the latest and greatest Linux/OS X apps...
I've often wondered how many Slashdot accounts are operated by paid shills and their ilk.
The difference is; when a Windows product is released to the masses it has a real name. When a Linux product is launched to the masses it retains whatever stupid code name that it originally had. Or rather it was given a stupid code name as it's REAL name.
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.
Hah! Microsoft have been astroturfing Slashdot for ages.
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.
My blog
Back in the day, there was "Team OS/2," perhaps the first internet astroturf campaign. It worked a little (at Microsoft's expense) but not enough. I bet Microsoft remembers though!
Well, looks like MS is going to add paid shill bloggers to their list of paid shills that they use to spread propoganda. There's one in every popular message board, blindly praising MS for everything they do. It's usually easy to pick them out, they just sound fake, and never rationalize anything. I have to wonder what just how many people MS pays to pretend they like everything MS does. After all, I can't imagine anyone doing that for free.
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?
God is real unless declared integer.
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)).
And of course Microsoft's notorious "Mac to Windows" switcher website was the one the took the cake. What took them down was using a stock photo... Sheesh!
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...
IANAL, but I've seen actors play them on TV
At last we have a nice concrete example of a large corporation admitting that they're going to spread their propaganda through blogs. It seems like only a couple of weeks ago that I was reading an article about how blogging was the new trusted, untainted source of information as compared to magazine articles. Hmmm, I said to myself, that doesn't seem very believable. Looks like journalists for traditional print-media might get a second chance after all as being some sort of independent voice.
Actually, you're supposed to write it "Microsoft® Windows®".
The Farewell Tour II
Now people will assume that any blogger that says nice things about Longhorn is being payed to do so... even if they aren't!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Donate free food here
Why is this modded up?
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?
Such as "people hack IE only because it is popular",
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...
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
Well, do you think it's coincident that Microsoft announced this blog-thing within three days since Mac OS X Tiger was released?
This is just a ploy to dim Tiger's limelight.
I can't tell if you're joking or not. That's just about how I feel about desktop linux.
Still IMing in the stone age?
Not worth my time [April 20th, 2005]
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.
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
I was part of one of Microsoft's attempts at getting people who were active on the Internet involved. At the Pocket PC, Wireless, and Beyond shindig in 2000 Microsoft invited 35 people - mainly Palm users - who were active online to Redmond, gave them each a couple of Pocket PCs (and mailed them a couple more over the years), and asked for feedback.
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?
And I am not even a Mac user...
A most overlooked advantage to owning a computer is if they foul up there's no law against wacking them around a bit.