Setting Expectations
Few seemed to have noticed Richard Edelman’s Friday afternoon before a three day weekend post about his PR firm’s latest scandel; handing out laptops paid for by Microsoft, AMD and Acer to current and prospective clients and associates.
Plain and simple it’s wrong for Edelman PR to boast they can deliver the blogisphere for their clients campaigns.
Microsoft has given hardware, software and SWAG to influencers in the community many times over the years as has AMD, but it was never done so clumsily and publicly before. What set off the laptops for bloggers scandal was the appearance that Microsoft was bribing bloggers and Edelman stood idly by as the flames burned.
Sending Mac zealots Windows loaded PC's is analogous to sending the iconography of one religion to devotees of another; blasphemy!
The truth is Edelman’s Me2Revolution Team is attempting to assemble a stable of bloggers who will be useful to them in future campaigns and this has been done at Microsoft's expence.
AMD lent a few Acer Ferrari laptops to the BlogHaus at CES and I checked their Windows Experience Index, it was 2.8. How are you going to persuade anyone that Windows Vista is a great OS without a GPU optimized for DirectX 10?