Bill Gates Buys Blogger Buzz
Want some positive blogger buzz about your product or service? Maybe you should just buy it like Bill Gates. To help promote the Zune and get some positive Microsoft buzz, Gates coughed up a dozen round trip plane tickets to Redmond, hotel rooms, and Zunes (of course) for a group of gadget and tech bloggers. He then hung out with the bloggers for an hour and answered one question from each of them. Once you factor in the total cost of this stunt, I wonder how much Gates paid per letter for a handful of blog posts?
So what did Microsoft get in return for all of this? Were the bloggers wooed by Bill’s big wallet? Yep.
- Check out the tech-news search engine Techmeme.com. Today their homepage was practically a mural to anything related to Bill Gates, the Zune or Microsoft in general.
- While most reviewers are panning the Zune, blogs like TechCrunch [see post], Micro Persuasion [see post], and GigaOm [see post], are restricting their Zune coverage to DRM issues or posting “feel good” pieces about Microsoft.
Honestly, my criticalness against these other blogs is probably part jealously. Why wasn’t MethodShop.com invited out to Redmond? Oh well, I’m an iPod guy anyway and we’re too small of a blog to make much of a dent for M$. But I do give some of these bloggers credit. Most of them (not Ryan) were upfront and disclosed that Gates gave them free Zunes and paid for their flights out to Microsoft headquarters.
But on the other hand, should corporate blogs like Micro Persuasion and GigaOm, who have venture-capital financing and/or big name PR firms, really be accepting free stuff and sacrificing their objectivity?
How cheap are your personal ethics?
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Entries (RSS)
December 15th, 2006 21:29
Interesting spin you put on it, I think it had far more to do with trying to work out what was going on with blogs than anything Zune related. How much of the discussion was around Zune? Very very little (I could only find a couple of questions on the topic, whereas there was a whole grilling from Molly about web standards) …
December 16th, 2006 06:45
chris, I am really disappointed with all you “Bloggers” that went to Microsoft yesterday and got to meet with Bill Gates. I was pretty excited to read your commentary but highly disappointed that none of you asked hard questions, especially about the zune. Frankly it pisses me off that none of you could ask a hard question. im glad that other blogs like MDL are calling you on your poor blogger ethics. what do you think henry copeland would say to you about your ethics?