anil, i usually agree with most of your comments, but i think you’re way too humble / way off base on this one…

celebrity endorsement has long been accepted as a reliable method of advertising (and if you don’t believe me, check out Robert Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, the de facto primer on the subject), and hiring notable bloggers to do PR & communication is certainly borrowing from that playbook.

now i’d agree there’s also incredible value in having someone skilled in blogging & other forms of social media on staff, as well as “cluetrain” skills such as transparency and quick acknowledgement of mistakes.

however, you’re wrong if you don’t think a company can boost product visibility and adoption (or at least the first beta test) by hiring a notable web personality. in fact, you yourself are one of the most significant cases in point.

- dave mcclure
http://500hats.typepad.com/

Doubtful. The talent the bloggers have is writing about the specific products. There is an inherent contradiction. Tiger Woods is respected because of his talent off the ‘product endorsement’ platform, and of its own nature. Same for Tom Cruise. When they endorse products they’re supposedly bringing their good taste and “skill” to get you to believe in the product too. When a blogger whose skill is WRITING about the product then he’s being paid to write about it inherently suspect. It doesn’t mean the conclusions the writers draw are incorrect, just that it would be more apropos to compare Tiger Woods being paid by the PGA to tout the PGA as being ‘better’ over the LPGA. While you still respect his talent as a golfer you’d have to wonder in the back of your mind whether the sentiment is sincere or purchased/ obligatory. To me it just taints the sincerity and objectivity of the voice, no matter how much freedom they are given to appear to be biting the hand that feeds them.

what happended to IBM …..

- “Why microsoft?”

- Becuase they offered more than I currently make and for a longer term.

- Rbowles

p.s. this is economics 101

As MDN pointed out, this quote is on Apple’s site ( http://www.apple.com/macosx/reaction/ )

The guy is clearly a tart, but how he can prostitute himself to this degree? Beats me.

1. Seek out and engage new users and new uses of technology (Microsoft technology, sure, but also Mac users, Symbian fans, Wii players, mesh networkers, mashups, web 2.5, etc.). People who can do this — and know how to differentiate interesting dead ends from what’s genuinely important and worth exploring further — are quite rare.

2. Bring those nuggets back to MSFT product development teams and communicate internally the urgency of meeting the needs of those users and use cases.

3. Take stories about hidden MSFT gems back to those users and the press (you have no idea how many press contacts someone like Michael has).

4. …and blog about it. (Why not?)

-avi

This is exactly why I always dread talking to MS-people. I can live with their products (though it rarely has my preference), but sentences like “no one else comes close to presenting a complete, unified and integrated view of the digital home of the 21st century” just make me want to puke.

For any MS-blogger to be credible he first has to stop using MS-speak.

Are you saying that Edwards’ bloggers and/or the Edwards campaign were somehow coerced?

Or perhaps you’re saying that the right-wingers should not have expressed their opinions of Edwards’ bloggers’ expressed opinions?

Also, please explain how you could have protected the Edwards campaign.

These latest two hires, although respected and trusted by large audiences, will not have the same positive effect as Scoble had. Simply because you cannot buy trust, you have to earn it.

I wouldn’t call it pay-per-post but its heading in that direction. Its no different than product endorsement by Tiger Woods or Tom Cruise.

When you blog on behalf of an organization life gets more complicated, and that’s what happened there. I don’t think the bloggers did anything wrong, and I don’t think Edwards did anything wrong, and I doubt if it’s going to have any lasting impact on the campaign.

The politics in the blogosphere itself are intense. I have been in the center of some pretty horrible shitstorms, and the people who perpetrate them are cynical mofos, they know how confusing things get and use that to hurt people. That’s clearly what happened here.

I don’t think Microsoft has been vicitimized by this yet, they’ve been pretty lucky, not sure why.

I thought Scoble was off the wall when he went after Ballmer the one time that he did (it had something to do with a Seattle religious leader and some employment issue at MS, not recalling all the facts). When someone blogs from inside an organization they accept limits that people who blog as individuals don’t have. I don’t think Scoble played fair on this when he worked at Microsoft, and I felt the same way when he blogged when he worked at UserLand (when I was CEO) and I made my feelings known to him. I said when he joined MS that I enjoyed his company more when he didn’t work for me. Later I came to enjoy his company more when he didn’t work for MS.

I blogged for a while on the home page of Harvard Law School, and when I did that, I used a very different voice from the one I used on Scripting News, and accepted limits (self-imposed, I had no editorial constraints or guidelines from the law school or the university) on what I would write about. But I didn’t stop writing Scripting News then, nor did I stop writing Scripting News when I was CEO of UserLand. You have to wear all these different hats. The right-wing bloggers interfered with the Edwards campaign and that wasn’t cool. We could have all done more to protect them, and in retrospect I think we should have. And the MSM got involved there too, kind of a conflict of interest, and pretty nasty.

I’ll probably expand on this tomorrow on my own blog. Please cut me some slack here because this is totally off the cuff, unedited and unrehearsed.

This is a great point, Dave — I’m not by any means saying Microsoft didn’t get a good hire in Robert, and I think between Scoble, Len Pryor, and a lot of those early bloggers at MS, there was a fundamental shift in the sense of “oh, there are *people* there!” What I think is frustrating is the idea of “well, if we hire someone who’s a popular blogger like Scoble was, suddenly that will make people like our products!”

And the truth is, not all popular bloggers are going to be good at telling the story of a company in a credible way. Much of Microsoft’s recent improvements in their perception comes from, well, just making better products. After *that*, having a good voice and persona to tell the story is key.

Anil, what do you mean by “original content” in this context? And, what (if anything) do you think /could/ effect that change?

I’m just happy you’re asking the question, Jon! What I mean is, the majority of what MS has published over the years has been, to one degree or another, core technical documentation and explanation. For example, I’m a *huge* fan of MSDN, and have been since the Windows “Chicago” days, but I think, relative to the huge adoption of blogging at MS, there’s been a relatively slow move towards making the messages of MS bloggers part of the experience of interacting with MS. I run Vista and Office 2007 on my laptop here — but there’s no way to get to the (excellent, in the case of Office) product blogs run by those teams.

If I had Jensen Harris blogging for me, I’d damn well build him into the application. I realize I came across above as more negative than I intended — my frustration stems from 1. there generally not being enough focus on bloggers as a key part of *building a company*, not just spreading the word and 2. seeing the talent/art/skill/whatever of blogging being treated almost as if it’s a physical attribute. Many popular bloggers work very hard at their craft, and businesses are recognizing it’s a skill that has value — that’s why you’re seeing bloggers becoming part of building a business.

Anil’s point:
As excited as I am for the increasing respect and attention being paid to the need for technology evangelism, I’m frustrated that there’s still a focus on the horse-trading aspect of nabbing a “big” blogger. These aren’t sports teams — the only thing that matters when a tech company hires a blogger, journalist, or analyst is if that person’s work helps grow the company, increase customer satisfaction, and move the industry forward.

Is exactly the right one — it’s not about the name, it’s about the work product.

Whatever credibility the man had, he completely lost it with that sell out statement. No company is more responsible for foisting an incoherent computer-centric digital mess on the consumer landscape than Microsoft. The only thing it has shown the ability to do is to make matters worse. Look no further than the massively anti consumer DRM they are forcing down the throats of the unwitting and unknowing public by pre-loading Vista on the clone computer boxes at every computer store.

Bloggers are in high demand lately. Everyone’s scoring one, and the bigger the pre-existing authority, the better.
Microsoft’s first technology evangelist, Robert Scoble, was a smashing success for the company. When he left Microsoft fo…

Anil, what do you mean by “original content” in this context? And, what (if anything) do you think /could/ effect that change?

- Jon

Back at the evangelism event I attended last December, a member of Microsoft’s evangelism team mentioned the company employs 800 full-time evangelists.  My friend Michael Gartenberg (yes, THE Michael Gartenberg - you know, the one who understand…

as we build pluggd from the ground up, i’m excited to have been involved from the start. i have the unique opportunity to make sure that the people who visit our site have a say in how we’re developing our technology. so evangelist, bridge, ambassador, resident geek? whatever the title is, i’m here to listen and interact.

Wow, I wish I had enough money to hire him to spew this crap for my company. Disclosure: I’ve made a lot of money because Microsoft exists. And I still say that they are (or were) one of the smartest strategists out there for their relentless support of the developer. MSDN License and giving everything easily and readily available to developers kicked Borland’s Delphi to the ground, C++ remains a difficult language and while VB is waning, Microsoft has upped the ante with C# and .NET tools. They are the biggest tech company in the world so I would hope that their R&D budget is bigger than the per capita income of combined small countries.

But (maybe with the exception of online connected play via a console ‘pioneering’ and Gates’s VB) please name me one thing that Microsoft has created independently. They purchase, use or steal everything they do from somewhere else.

OS= “improved” from DOS
windows =- “improved” from Apple
Sharepoint = “improved” from IBM Rational
Smart*cough*phone = “improved” from ?? everyone else
XBox = “improved” from Sony
SQL Server = “improved” from frm Sybase
Zune = duh
CRM3 = “improved” from SalesForce
IE = duh
Caller ID for E-Mail -”improved” from Failsafe Designs
Outlook -”improved” from Eudora/
LiveSearch = duh
MSFT Spaces = duh
on and on

I know that Lessig says that without a method of tracing each production of an individual, there is no method of tracking stolen ideas, or stolen works. But still. I still think they are a monopoly. Thank god for VCs willing to take risks with start-ups and fostering an environment where they have at least a fighting chance.

Keep in mind I know nothing about Gartenberg, so these comments do not necessarily relate to this *particular* instance

Channel 9 is refered to by a lot of hires, too. So it sure changed recruiting at Microsoft.