Why giving Ferraris to Bloggers is a bad idea

It seems that Microsoft, inspired by their PR agency Edelman, has given a bunch of A list bloggers Vista loaded Acer "Ferrari" laptops (though they are not even red), in the hope that the blogware produced will ignite a fire under our asses and we will all go purchase said OS.

Well, first things first - few with the faintest experience of a new OS will buy it early, it's just too important a thing to use before the bugs are ironed out. Wait for SP1 at least!

Secondly, and more important, it won't work because the blogosphere is a transparent social network .

This is basically an attempt to buy a tipping point, and thats all fine and good (obeys Ecclesiates Law after all) and its good Old Marketing and PR. The theory is that you find those social nodes, those hypernetworked individuals, and they spread the word and influence les autres. Worked well in the old media, work here, right?

Unfortunately, it violates 2 basic principles of human networks:

(i) the influencing effect of those social hypernetworkers only works if we are receptive and trust them. Now that I know these guys (any gals?) have access to a tailored laptop, preloaded etc, I know their wisdom is no longer that of the Crowd - I suspect it is going to be tainted (even if not the case), so I have already discounted them. And, since I don't know who has and has not had the gift, I will distrust them all on this subject!

(ii) worse still, we don't by and large like "cheating" behaviour in a social network - its been shown in fact in a number of psychological studies that we will actually deny ourselves a benefit to ensure someone else does not get an advantage perceived as unfair. This "cheating by gifting" was not transparent in old media, so had a lesser effect, but it is in the blogosphere. Now, there is an alternative argument that making something exclusive increases its cachet, but I suggest that limited access to a mass production OS for geeky types is not that thing.

In my opinion it also flies in the face of the Web2.0 ethos, which is open access, and a beta testing approach to get crowd wisdom going. To an extent I think the initial secrecy by some (many?) of the recipients, and the defensive reactions when they were held to account shows that they kinda know this too (see here and here for example). What, after all, is the difference between this and the lyin', cheatin' and otherwise Bad Old Media that some of these same people have so disparaged?

I am also surprised at Edelman (if it is their idea as reported), after the Walmart gaffe (where they were pretending to be mom and pop bloggers for that very large corporate). I think its clear these guys don't really "get" the impact of transparency in a social network, despite Steve Rubel's view that social media is old hat. Once is unfortunate.....

Even then, you would have thought that LeWeb3 would have taught those who designed this the lesson - again - don't try and influence lots of people in a heavy handed way in an open system. Bad news is we all get to see whats going in the blogosphere. Worse news is grumpy people tell a lot more people than happy ones.

As to a personal reaction - call it being contrarian, call it envy, call it what you will, but I will always try to buy from a competitor of a company that does this sort of thing. I just don't like working with companies that are happy to work this way. I like to think companies I buy from treat all their customers equally, naive though that is, and I believe if many people thought that way and acted on it, more companies would.

And when thinking of the A list blaggers in future, my thoughts will turn to Animal Farm....Someone will publish the Sin List of those who blogged and never disclosed, it will come back to haunt them....

Update...this is too much...now Microsoft wants the laptops back! Talk about oil on troubled waters.

What I don't get is this is all so darned obvious....the level of ignorance about how social media works, even (especially?) by the so called pros is clearly still very high!

Postscript - good analysis of what was done wrong is given here, and of the ethics involved here. I read quite a bit about this all after posting, and I don't think its envy per se as some people assert - I think the distaste is the same that we have for politicians, financial pundits etc whose influence is "bought" - and it goes back to the way humans operate in social networks.

I also wondered whether this was in fact an attempt to create a Wildean Effect (it is better to be talked about....), but my instinct is that negative publicity for something like an OS purchase would be very counterproductive.

Post Postscript - been having a conversation with Hugh MacLeod on this over at his blog (Hugh blogs/flogs a particular South African wine*, but he is totally upfront about it which imho is a crucial difference). Anyway, he asked who I would no longer trust. Interesting question, I think there is a heirarchy of social network trust here:

1. Highest Trust = person writing without the laptop gift.
2. Next = one who disclosed at point of reception
3. Then = one who was forced to disclose (aka outed) early and was contrite
4. Last = one who was "outed" and/or sees nothing ethically wrong with it.

* Note - All South African wine is of course God's nectar, not just the one Hugh flogs. My favourites are Uitkyk, Kanonkop and Klein Constantia, and no I've never been given a free bottle by any of them