Microsoft promotes blogs among authors, not readers

Microsoft sales in Russia more than doubled over the past year. A
year ago, they surpassed $ 250 million, and now they have reached $ 600 million.
Microsoft has Napoleonic plans , but it will be practically impossible to
implement without Russian-speaking workers in Redmond. If the
R&D center is to be opened in Russia (and this will definitely happen, a matter of time),
people from Redmond who know the process, company standards
, etc. Therefore, at the moment, it is necessary to establish close ties
between the two branches of the company, to involve Russian-speaking employees
from Redmond in the “common cause”.

So here. In May 2006, Moscow troops landed with us, gathered
us for lunch and announced that according to a public opinion poll
Russian IT-employees, for 3 points Microsoft is ill: quality,
safety, and support. (What other parameters can be praised, I
really don’t know). And then they decided that they could not fix the first two, but
perhaps the last! The problem, it turns out, is that IT people in
Russia do not speak English (in general, the shame is actually ahem, ahem).
And in order to create the idea that Microsoft is not so
inaccessible, and also speaks Russian, we were asked to open blogs on
technet (http://technet.microsoft.com).


Here www.microsoft.com/rus/technet/blogs/portalhome.mspx is a technet entry into Russian blogs, there is mine too.
Prizes were announced for successful blogging. The first is 100,000 airline miles
Delta. The second is 50,000 miles, the third is probably 25,000, but I don’t remember.
Plus 100 dollar certificates at amazon.com. The results promised to
fail every fin. year. Because then to the end of the fin. there
was a little more than a month, I thought it was cool, telling me
that they would read it, and even the
second prize is a free flight ticket to anywhere in Europe and back,
also not bad at all. (Prizes were given for the number of hits on the blog). Well, that's
it.

In addition to Technet, which itself is popular, RSS goes to various IT
forums along with other Russian tech blogs. Therefore, the blog, as it were,
"PR itself" without any cost to my efforts. All this
Of course, because this is not a separate blog, but part of the large
blogosphere of a large company that does not particularly need PR, it
is PR itself.

Boris Kogan, Microsoft

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