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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."
I've often wondered how many Slashdot accounts are operated by paid shills and their ilk.
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
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.
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.
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?