Xbox One Microsoft Hiring People To Post On Reddit

Khronic

Khronic

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Business Insider is reporting that Microsoft has hired employees to post on Reddit as people not associated with Microsoft to up vote comments speaking good of Microsoft and down vote comments that do the opposite. Very interesting piece of news seeing how the game of press has changes over the years with the rise of the internet. Just how good advertising programs are important, websites like Reddit are prime locations to give hype for your product. What are your thoughts on this article?

Via: Business Insider
 
Wow... Just wow. Microsoft is turning into an absolute crap company, I don't see why they would do this. Instead of doing this, why not just listen to the complaints and fix them? Is that really hard to do? Things like this just makes me furious.
 
I'd like to say this has been proven to be completely false as pointed out by the Reddit moderators and staff. The user in question had joined a day before he posted this claim and he posted no evidence towards this. I myself am an avid user of Reddit.

The link to the original post has been deleted.

Here is a link to the post where the moderators explain how it was mostly wild speculation.

Reddit is mostly completely against the Xbox one at the moment so for a while I wouldn't believe anything on /r/gaming until the console is released.
 
Doesn't really surprise me. I think many more companies use online hidden marketing than one would assume and not just on Reddit. It's just an evolution of marketing in my opinion and I think this will only become more and more common place. I remember watching a documentary that showed successful looking people (dudes in suits) were paid to walk around the city talking loudly on their cellphone about how great x product/company is. /shrug.
 
This shouldn't surprise anyone. Many, many companies send in yes men to do damage control and try to rally support for their product or service, it definitely shouldn't surprise you that Microsoft does it. It's disappointing but it happens.
 
I'm pretty sure they also did this with their Xbox One Reveal video on Youtube. Somebody posted a before and after screenshot of the like/dislike bar. Originally it was something like 30% likes and 70% dislikes and then all of a sudden an hour later it was the other way round.
 
I'm not surprised there was a post about it being speculation. I was thinking all along, how do people really know?!? I think people just mostly jumped on board with the story because they liked it so much. The amount of hate going around on Reddit is so ridiculous right now. Everyone thinks it's somehow interesting to post "I've been an Xbox fan for x years but I'm going to buy a Playstation now!!!" Like we care about your personal console buying choice? It's a lot of Xbox bashing for karma, seems like to me. I get you're passionate about it, but buy the console that you think is the best for you, that's how capitalism works.
 
I highly doubt they actually 'hired' anyone to specifically write on reddit, but every big company has a social media marketing team. These people specialize in this type of activity. It wouldn't be unheard of that someone up the chain recommended some employees to get in there and do some damage control.
 
It's just a bunch of BS, even one of my friends got called a MS employee. I purchased both consoles at launch last gen but I will only be purchasing a xbox one at launch this time, IMO it's a way more advanced system. I agree 100%, purchase what you feel is best for youself.
 
This news shouldn't surprise you. If you know anyone that works in PR or marketing it's pretty common practice to go out and try to sway opinion as discretely as possible. The best way to market to someone is when that person doesn't know they're being marketed to. Some call this method guerrilla marketing. In reality, countless companies are probably doing the exact same thing.
 
This is beyond damage control. Besides, how can you do damage control to something that bombed so hard anyway? I think they should spend money in getting a better console and less in expensive cars and hired marketing.
 
Whether or not this is true, as other people have mentioned, most companies have a social media outreach department. Can you honestly say that you don't think that with the uproar over the past few days/weeks that Sony hasn't deployed a few people to fuel the fire on Reddit? I'm just saying, it doesn't matter to me either way whether you are a paid shill or a genuine person behind that post. If I agree with your opinion and can validate your facts then it doesn't really matter, if you are outright lying and you are talking like a crackpot I'm going to ignore what you have to say anyway.
 
I don't see how this really matters. Whether they spent money or not to do what some random people claim to have "seen" is ridiculous. All I see is fanboys of other consoles starting up drama about a company and people are buying it.
 
I'm pretty sure hoax or not some people representing Microsoft are already all over social media. This is a moot point as to whether in this case, they're on reddit or not.
 
It's amazing anyone would take anyone's word on Reddit as truth, it's just way too easy to spread misinformation on that website.

Bottom-line every company does stuff like this but without any evidence it's nothing more than rumors.
 
That is just tragic to me. Instead of Microsoft wasting money on getting fake reviews and comments why not fix the problems, make it even better than how it currently is and get real quality reviews and comments, doesn't that make more sense?
 
Haha, I love it. Microsoft has gone all blackhat although I am surprised at the simple nature of it, As Microsoft are a tech company i would assume that they will have more sophisticated ways of doing it.
rather than a few employees posting and like stuff.
 
I may have believed it if there was the slightest iota of convincing evidence in the report other than a random person's anecdote of the matter. This isn't to say that it doesn't happen, however, just not on Reddit. A user here already stated that many companies have a division for social networking, the thing is that it is for more influential areas such as Facebook and Twitter, not a cesspool like Reddit. That's right, if you ever spent more than ten minutes on Reddit, you'd see that it isn't exactly the best place to be hiring people to upvote and downvote comments.
 
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