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Comment by DevX101 | Hacker News Reader

I love reddit, but I place some of the blame in this fiasco on the reddit admins -- raldi & company. They came out a few weeks ago and mentioned explicitly that they were MANAGING the ad campaign for IE9.

Now, the reddit admins are abosulutely excellent at connecting with their audience. When the site goes down for a bit, they put out technical no-BS posts that get upvoted close to 1000 times, and all is forgiven.

The admins should have interjected themselves before this response was posted and warned Microsoft marketing this 'this response won't fly here'.

Reddit is at an important inflection now, and the admins need to step up and become the Don Draper for their world of tech users. If this campaign had succeeded, I could absolutely see many other companies coming to them and paying big bucks for similar campaigns.

There's still an AMA coming up today, so there's a chance to recover, so we'll see how that goes.

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>The admins should have interjected themselves before this response was posted and warned Microsoft marketing this 'this response won't fly here'.

How do you know they didn't? Maybe they did and Microsoft ignored their advice.

Regardless, I blame Microsoft for not understanding marketing. The whole point of doing this sort of Q&A thing is to give a community exclusive access to build rapport. That's just basic. And they promised exclusive access and instead delivered marketing tripe where people were expecting exclusive developer commentary.

At some level Microsoft know's they're not ideally cut out for doing this type of dynamic marketing. Which is why they put the reddit team in charge of the campagin in the first place.

The admins should have made it clear in no uncertain terms that this post would be a disaster. If they didn't do that convincingly enough, that's their fault.

> The admins should have made it clear in no uncertain terms that this post would be a disaster

I dunno. If you look at some of the more technical stuff the MS devs post on channel9 (and some of it being really, really good) you could almost imagine that there could have been an interesting and informative exchange of information here.

Honestly, I don't think there could have. Take for example, the question on spell checking. The right response, IMO, would have been. "Given everything else we needed to do and still needs to do, this is pretty far down on the priority list."

I'm sure that would have been disliked just as much as their response, which I actually sort of liked as it went into more detail about how items get prioritized.

But a general tip to the IE team... you can tell customers your decisions, not how you arrived at them. In general the most vocal people will be those that disagree with your decisions, and can then attack how you made the decisions.

>How do you know they didn't? Maybe they did and Microsoft ignored their advice.

I now have reason to believe you're correct.

"In fact, they've taken the unprecedented step of putting the reddit team in charge of this entire campaign. This is a great deal of trust for an advertiser to offer, and we should both take it as a huge compliment.

So, how should we do this? If there's one thing I've learned in my five-plus years at reddit, it's that the direct and open approach works best, so instead of marketspeak..."

I think it's safe to say MS should've been aware that this was probably not the best way to respond to reddits questions.

Do you have a link to where they mentioned they'd manage it? If they did, your points speak volumes.

Here's the link announcing they will be managing the campaign:

http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/depct/and_now_for_a_wo...

Quote from the link: "See, Microsoft is getting ready to release Internet Explorer 9, and they reached out to us because they genuinely want to start a dialog with the reddit community. In fact, they've taken the unprecedented step of putting the reddit team in charge of this entire campaign."

Personally I think Microsoft is trying to emulate the annoying Sony/Playstation 3 actor.

The problem with this is that it is mostly annoying to everyone (including people who might have been on the fence regarding a playstation 3)

It's hard to pull off tongue in cheek humor when the person you're telling the joke to believes you really mean it.

An ideal IE9 would be something that I don't have to spend much time thinking/worrying about. I have a feeling that won't be the case though - as it has never been so.

Here is the AMA that just started. Seems the reddit base is riled up against them from the start.

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/dkk3l/iama_we_are_memb...

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