What I learned from the IE8 competition… since I paid for it :)

re: What I learned from the IE8 competition… since I paid for it :)

SilkCharm — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 10:59:08 GMT

Fantastic summary - and really, not a-typical. I mean, not just Microsoft gets this range of response, most companies do when creating ARGs and other marketing campaigns. It particularly amuses me how consumers take an obvious purpose (build awareness) - and make it a dark, nefarious, hidden purpose (they are trying to get us to know about their product!!)

The interesting part for me is how a company can reflect as a community the range of diversity and opinion that mirrors the 'net, and real life. For example, some of the most aggressively outspoken anti-social media people in Australia are from MIcrosoft. Yet others are incredibly supportive of both personal and business aims around the social web.

Thank you for revealing the challenges and responses in a transparent way, of your campaign. I often think the post-project wrap up group (collective) discussion is missing from time-spiked events campaigns.

Some measurements would be interesting - what was the % of "yay, Microsoft knows how to play with us" vs "The Twitter account should be for customer service and technical support and to help us, not to prmote their products" did you get? KPIs set beforehand (did you estimate thousands of followers?) or was the whole thing an experiment? :)

Anyway thankyou, I've bookmarked this post for my social media campaign, sm monitoring/measurement, arg game courses :)

re: What I learned from the IE8 competition… since I paid for it :)

gianpaolo — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 11:19:09 GMT

thanks for your feedback, we are collecting stats, we'll wait a bit longer before sharing some of the results

re: What I learned from the IE8 competition… since I paid for it :)

NetMagellan — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 14:25:46 GMT

As a long-term IE (and other MSFT products) beta tester and user I am pleased to see any marketing effort. What annoyed me was the execution, especially when the competition page pointed to a domain name (tengrandisburiedhere.com) that was offline for at least three days. Now that it is up, it merely 301s to the competition page at http://www.microsoft.com/australia/ie8/competition/default.aspx.

The wording "Follow @tengrand_IE8 on Twitter and www.tengrandisburiedhere.com for daily clues." might be OK anywhere other than the competition page.

re: What I learned from the IE8 competition… since I paid for it :)

jtenos — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 16:22:54 GMT

You briefly mentioned it, but didn't really dive in: the main reason many people hate this competition is that it defines one of the top reasons IE is considered to be a bad browser. If there is a part of the web that is only available to IE, then that means that IE is not following the community-adopted web standards, opting instead to have "Microsoft" standards.

It's this line of thinking that has gotten Microsoft in so much trouble over the years. Microsoft should not be celebrating the fact that people still build IE-only sites - instead, they should be focusing on actually making IE better, while also starting to follow web standards.

I admit that IE8 is a step in the right direction - new features, extensions, and better standards conformance - but the fact that this competition exists proves that they're still not fully conforming to the same standards as the community. I'd much rather see something that highlights a good reason IE8 is unique, something like the new web slices or a new extension - that way, they'd be actually showing something good, instead of packaging up something terrible and trying to make it look good.

re: What I learned from the IE8 competition… since I paid for it :)

gianpaolo — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 01:46:56 GMT

Thanks Joe for your feedback. Happy to hear that you see IE8 moving in the right direction. The different page renderings based on the browser was meant to add some quirkiness in the competition, it is a simple 'if' based on the user agent and nothing to do with not supporting standards. I can assure you that Microsoft and IE team are absolutely committed to Web Standards.

re: What I learned from the IE8 competition… since I paid for it :)

jtenos — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 03:08:26 GMT

Gianpaolo:

If that's the case, then I suppose it's not bad. However, people don't seem to know that - I've read a lot of opinions about this, and all of them seem to think that it's a standards thing.

Thanks for clarifying that.

re: What I learned from the IE8 competition… since I paid for it :)

songcarver — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 02:37:04 GMT

Hi Gianpaolo,

For your info, I'm a guy who makes his living developing software. I'm based here in Oz.

I have to admit to you, that this ad campaign competition caused me a bit of national embarrassment. Australia has a phenomenal community of savvy, skilled hard-working and open-minded software and web developers, most of which would never dream of such blunt approaches.

That line the campaign had recommending that users of other browsers 'Get lost' leaves a bad taste in my mouth still, even after the text was removed. What's the point? Aren't these people part of the crowd you want to convert?

The campaign doesn't much 'sell the benefits', being more akin to those rug commercials where some fella yells at you for 30 seconds.

AND the site went down on launch. Surely you guys have the resources to scale on demand? I hoped people wouldn't interpret that as some representation of Australian IT ability. We also have talented graphic artists, not represented by the blurry graphics used in this campaign.

http://www.microsoft.com/australia/ie8/competition/images/download-IE8.png

All news is good news, though… which is good considering 80% of @tengrand_IE8 tweets are negative.

I do applaud one outcome though - less people using IE6.

Keith