Bloggers outraged at Asus
IRATE BLOGGERS are up in arms at Asus after a blogging competition at electricpig.com turned sour.
A while back, Asus decided it would save itself ooodles of cash on marketing and advertising by picking six people from the ranks of the unwashed masses and asking them to 'blog' about certain products they'd been given for review. Readers, said Asus, would be able to vote for their favorite blogger and the winner of the popular vote would be able to keep their Asus review kit. But alas, it wasn't to be.
Readers, in their naive ignorance, voted for a particularly honest - read, not entirely Asus kissing - blogger by the name of Gavyn Britton, a choice Asus wasn't so keen on. So the Taiwanese computer maker decided to change the rules of the competition.
It announced that the readers' vote was all very quaint and democratic, but that, instead, the six bloggers had to vote for each other and that would decide the competition. This sudden change in the rules led to a different blogger, Emma Hill, winning three out of six blogger votes.
With much pomp and ceremony, Asus announced that Ms Hill had won 50 per cent of the blogger vote which, while accurate, was also seriously misleading. Therefore, while she didn't win the popular vote, Emma Hill got to keep her Asus Eee Top ET1602 whilst poor old Gavyn Britton got shrugged off with an Eee PC for his troubles, instead of the much more expensive G71V 17-inch laptop that he had reviewed.
Over the last week, the INQ has been inundated with complaints about Asus' competition and its winner selection process, with many feeling Asus cynically used bloggers as a cheap way of generating buzz in an ad campaign that cost it very little.
When we confronted Asus, we were told by a spokesperson, "It was certainly not our intention to play dirty in the blogging campaign."
A statement from the firm bizarrely reads "Certain aspects of the voting system meant that we felt it was no longer not a level playing field for all of the bloggers. Some might argue that people were simply using the power of the internet. We felt that the fairest way would be to ask each blogger to vote for their favourite."
The double negative in that statement is an unintentionally comedic but devastatingly telling Freudian slip.
So, Asus didn't mind using the "power of the internet" to promote its products, but allowing readers to vote for a favorite blogger whom Asus didn't want to see win was not okay apparently.
Asus also told the INQ it had "upgraded the Eee PC model supplied to each blogger to thank them for their time," but neglected to say what it had upgraded to.
But despite the firm's insistence that "there was no intention to worm out of awarding the rightful winner their prize," we still find the whole affair more than a little odious. µ
Share this:
ShareBusiness Intelligence Software
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Enterprise Accounting Software
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
Enterprise Systems Management
Oh, please...
These yahoos got a free Eee (or whatever) out of this just for posting a few entries in their blogs? And they're complaining? Oh, wait, it's not them that are complaining, it's a bunch of other people that feel that it wasn't 'fair'.....
Oh, get over yourselves. The universe in general isn't 'fair'... Not only can you not win, you can't even break even. (see laws of thermodynamics).
So stop your whining, you pitiful bunch of congenital losers.
Nothing more than the application of the 'Golden Rule': Thems that has the gold makes the rules...
If Asus wants to change things midway through, they can, they have every right. If the participants didn't like it, they could have stopped participating. They didn't, so they didn't have a problem.
Besides, do you think ANY PR person gives a rat's ass about 'fairness'? They're trying to keep their jobs, ferchrissake.
"Besides, do you think ANY PR person gives a rat's ass about 'fairness'? They're trying to keep their jobs, ferchrissake." -Rich
Asus should care. If a customer see the company not playing by their own rules when dealing with others, it may make them leary about becoming a customer of Asus.
The right thing to do would have been to award both the "user voted" and "blogger voted" winners their equipment an learn the lesson. How much would it have cost Asus to do this? Peanuts. They would have gained the goodwill of bloggers AND millions of potential customers. Asus should have done the right thing and just learned the lesson on how to structure future contests. This is what grown up companies do.
That was a compettition -
and this is bad sports.
Remind me not to play with ASUS again...
When the public get asked to vote for a singer/blogger/big brother contestant, it all becomes about popularity. The electric pigs (the website run by the idiots who changed the rules) should have based the competition on web views and not a popularity vote.
The fair thing to do would be to give both the popularity vote and the other rigged vote a computer each.
This proves that idiots shouldn't run competitions.
ASUS - do the right thing and take the knock on the chin.
Similarities with recent events in Iran seem more than just coincidental.
Crappy website, poor customer service, products that become outdated soon after you buy them because ASUS moves onto the next product...and if you are brave enough to bios flash one of their boards, you'll more than likely end up with a paperweight.
Nope, you can only live on your reputation so long and that time has come. Stick a fork in ASUS, they're done.
Asus is terrible company, I have tons of horror stories about them. I will never buy Asus again after I wasted another $400...sigh
IMO, Asus has been unscrupulous for years. They have manipulated reviews of their products for years even providing hand picked boards, special BIOS unavailable to the public, tweeked hardware, etc. all to dupe the sheep. Many websites have exposed critcal design and production defects in Asus products, but those who profit from promoting Asus products maintain the hype and the sheep law down their cash for crap.
Computer programmers have to deal with instruction and instruction format changes each time they write a program.
To every tweak, there is always a chance of crashing the system, many may say tough luck or deal with it, on on the fly changes, but watch out, simpler things like these in other countries broke the backbone of their freedoms and constitutions.
If you treat, the social fabric like computer programs, your asking for trouble. Sorta to little... To cliché!
And yes I avoid contests that reserve the right to change rules, it's equivalent to adding a Fat chance clause
to your entry. BTW wouldn't that be some sort of profiling?