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传nVIDIA雇佣论坛枪手宣传其产品！ |
2009-05-06 |
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2006-2-10 9:55:00 文/Anton Shilov 出处：www.discloser.net Nvidia Corp. Monday faced charges over hiring fans to communicate with computer enthusiasts in forums and communities, get needs and requirements of hardware users for the graphics processors developer, share the technical information with the end user, pre-test software and hardware and, possibly, create positive image of Nvidia’s products in computer forums. The firm has admitted some of the actions, but denied other allegations.
Nvidia Teams Up with AEG
Hardware web-site EliteBastards and certain members of forums of Beyond3D web-site have discovered that Nvidia is a client of Arbutnhot Entertainment Group (AEG) which specializes in working with editors in enthusiast and consumer media to obtain maximum exposure for its clients’ products and also identifying and “cultivating” influential online communities to generate “grassroots buzz and positive word-of-mouth”. A member of the Beyond3D forums has suggested that Nvidia pays or provides special privileges to people who help to spread good words about the company’s products within communities as a part of its deal with AEG, a claim which was supported by web-site The Consumerist, which is focused on criticizing advertisements by the companies. The link to the article by Consumerist reached well-known news-blog of HardOCP web-site.
In fact, the member over the Beyond3D forums posted his first message concerning the matter on the 1st of December, 2005, EliteBastards followed with its publication in early December too. The findings about AEG and Nvidia relationships have been discussed in various forums since then. The Consumerist posted its first issue concerning the matter on the 6th of February, 2006, which means that it took a rumour more than two months to reach this web-site, a very long amount of time for the Web, where significant news spread in hours.
It is unclear when exactly Nvidia started to use services of AEG and for what, but it is known that AEG was founded in 1996, whereas the success stories of the company include projects that are maximum five years old.
Among other clients of AEG there are Atari, Stardock, 2K Games, Microsoft Corp. and others. Except Microsoft, the three software companies claim that AEG helped them to create “positive buzz” and “expand online discussion” of their products. AEG’s means and methods of creating “positive buzz” and “expand online discussions” are unknown, but generally the sources of such positive “buzzing” should be reviews of the products available around the Internet so that was something to discuss.
Nvidia Condemned for “Community Outreach Programs”
Usually, outsourcing parts of operations to third parties is traditional for the information technology industry. The reason why Nvidia Corp. got denounced were launches of “community outreach programs”, which it admitted, but declined to reveal what exactly they had been doing immediately after he was asked .
“AEG serves a pivotal role in helping us to build and manage online buzz for Nvidia products. AEG’s online community outreach programs have been extraordinarily successful in improving public perception of our company and its products. So much that we’ve recently expanded AEG’s role into some of our other product lines. AEG plays an essential role in our marketing and public relations programs. In our opinion, they’re the best-of-breed experts in the field of online PR and community management,” said Derek Perez, the head of public relations at Nvidia Corp.
Being a company that should obey the laws and principles of ethics, Nvidia is unlikely to contract AEG to do something not completely legal or involving any conspiracy. Even if it did, it would try to do its best to hide the fact that it has ties with AEG. A suspicious thing is that AEG itself denies to disclose what exactly it is contracted to do (possibly, due to terms of the agreement with Nvidia Corp.) and also reportedly obliges its employees to keep the tongues behind their teeth.
The Consumerist web-site has also found a post in a forum that was written by anonymous author claiming he was offered a job of “professional forum poster”. The unknown person has reportedly written the following:
“I interviewed for a guerilla marketing business in San Francisco (AEG is based in Los Angeles , California – note by X-bit labs) that targeted web forums. I was told that if I accepted the job, I was to have at LEAST 50 identities on as many forums as I could muster (they wanted 100 eventually), with a goal of 5 posts an hour. The posts had to be well thought out, and the idea was that I was to establish multiple identities with a history on the forums, so that when the timing was right a well written but subtly placed marketing post could be finessed in. And regular visitors would recognize the post as coming from a long time poster.”
The anonymous young man explained that the unnamed company had 12 people working there full time, and were hiring 10 more. It is suggested that such a group created 880 posts a day (if minimum was met) in, perhaps, 100 forums, from at least 50 identities.
30” Monitors for Educating People Around the Web?
The Consumerist web-site wrote based on words from a yet another anonymous reader who claimed, based on what he said was a talk with an AEG employee, that AEG seeks influential members of message boards to approach for membership in their marketing program. He said that those members were required to sign a non-disclosure (NDA) agreement about the program’s very existence, which was later denied by Nvidia Corp.’s Derek Perez. But despite of claimed NDA, the anonymous reader said that based on his conversations with “a member of this program”, Nvidia Corp. offered its supporters 30” liquid crystal displays (LCDs), a claim that Mr. Perez also denied later.
Mr. Perez, however, is quoted to have said that AEG helped the leading GPU company “to manage the online community” and “help educate people on the Web”. Additionally, the technology fans reportedly provided necessary feedback about the software and hardware by Nvidia. It is consistently denied that Nvidia has paid anybody for open praise of its products in the forums or asked to sign NDAs. In case no NDAs were signed, this explains why there is a massive amount of beta drivers from Nvidia floating over the Internet…
It is unclear whether moderators of the forums, who are supposed to manage online communities and who, based on the state of X-bit labs forums , are pretty successful in doing it, need any third-party assistants who are encouraged by AEG or Nvidia. On the other hand, moderators of fan-sites of Nvidia also help to manage their community and those probably should be supported by Nvidia.
It is also unclear what exactly is called “education people on the Web” and why this task is not fully covered by the online media – hundreds of web-sites which are supposed to provide clear and unbiased judgments about products by different companies. It is known, nonetheless, that journalists receive much more information about hardware than typical forum visitors: ATI Technologies, Intel Corp. and Nvidia Corp. itself have a lot of events for journalists to provide their visions of the present and the future, which allows the media to form a very balanced point of view. People who are educated by only one side will bring in claims that make sense, but will admire only certain products, on the other hand.
Advertising? PR Programs? Product Placement? Black PR?
In addition to high-performance, robust, feature-rich and stable products, the community of hardware enthusiasts have helped Nvidia to find itself on top of the graphics world one day. Communities do count in millions these days, however, their reach is not as high as the reach of the media for buyers. Moreover, there are customers who do not visit forums and who do not stopover review web-sites. How do they make their purchase decisions? Perhaps, after consulting with computer gurus they know, after talking to shop assistants, or based on other things like size and colour of the packaging…
Launching a product that wins reviews is not forbidden, just as providing shop assistants a list of selling points for your products. Packaging is something that every maker points a lot of attention to. All of such “actions” are performed by companies constantly and adding something hardly brings any significant results. However, let us still consider the possible actions to convince a community.
Obviously, providing 30” monitors to fans who would praise Nvidia’s products in forums will hardly bring Nvidia the money back: it would need tens of “professional” forum posters to address thousands of communities, or hundreds of “amateur” forum posters who post from time to time. Obviously, hiring tens of full-time employees will cost quite a lot, just as giving hundreds of them displays that cost over $2000 each.
It would make sense, however, to implement product placements into blogs: a person who is read by several hundreds of virtual friends, and is considered as a professional who will only use the best of the best, is definitely an excellent way of convincing people in the technological leadership of a company. Initially, the quality of content works for authority and then authority acts as quality content. There are no quality blogs for such methods of advertising as far as we are aware to date.
Product placement nowadays is officially used in movies: in the sequel to the action thriller “The Transporter”, the 12-cylinder Audi A8 plays a key role alongside agent Frank Martin (Jason Statham). Star gamer Fatal1ty officially uses Abit-branded mainboards and Creative Labs-branded audio cards. Both ATI and Nvidia officially support gaming teams with hardware.
It would also make sense to post information about how bad the competing products are: being hardware reviewers, we know that products from both ATI and Nvidia have their pros and cons, so, at some point it may be easier and fruitful to post tens of posts into various forums in an attempt to exaggerate disadvantages of the competition and exalt advantages of “the right company”.
A good news spreads quickly, a bad one spreads even quicker. Why not post both?
FanATIcs vs. Nvidia Fanboys: Statistics
This page may offend some of our readers and forum posters. We admit. Sorry. But we honestly think that it makes sense to post this kind of thoughts here rather than encourage witch hunting, which have already begun in multiply forums.
Those who admire products by Advanced Micro Devices and Nvidia Corp. are a way more aggressive in the forums and against the journalists compared to those who prefer products by ATI Technologies and Intel Corp. This is an observation that has been made in several years. We do not know why this theory works, but we do believe that the people do not receive salaries from the aforementioned companies.
The most recent example: at least three readers pointed out, in a quite aggressive way, that some of the GeForce 7800-based graphics cards, certain models from certain manufacturers, supported dual-link DVI outputs to support those “well-known” and “wide-spread” 30” displays in a response to our claim that users of those high-end monitors should choose ATI Radeon X1000-based accelerators to drive those LCDs properly. No adorer of the Radeon products pointed out that there are some Radeon X1600- and X1300-based graphics cards from some manufacturers that feature passive cooling systems in a response to our allegations of noisy cooling systems on reference designs of the mentioned products.
Another example: X-bit labs has been (re-)using results obtained on Catalyst version 5.9 with Radeon X1000 support for all its graphics cards’ reviews in October and November last year (there were exceptions made for Doom III and Quake 4 benchmarks conducted using Catalyst 5.10a drivers which brought significant performance improvements for these two games) with only two objections made in a very polite way be our readers. Once we engaged Catalyst 5.12 in a review dated the 8th of December, 2005 , we were requested in a very aggressive manner by numerous readers to use Nvidia ForceWare 81.95 drivers dated December 9, 2005.
We have received numerous accusations of bias when we reviewed flagship ATI Radeon X1800 XT and X1900 XTX series and none when we reviewed Nvidia GeForce 7800 GTX and 7800 GTX 512 products.
For the sake of the truth we have to admit that several weeks ago we received a very emotional complain from a man claiming that his Nvidia nForce4-based mainboard did not satisfy his needs and that officials do not want to respond to him in support forums. When asked to clarify the issues, the reader has vanished into oblivion.
We do not think that people who write us and make their points are getting paid by certain companies, even though such way of pressing on the media would be very efficient. We do like all of our commentators: luckily, the majority of them really make pretty interesting points. We encourage them to write and comment and we do not know why some behave the way they do. At the end of the day, everybody prefers products he or she likes for some reason and nobody should try to offend him or her because of that.
Show Me The Money!
While all of the aforementioned web-sites have discovered an unknown business practice by Nvidia Corp., there is no real information from such discovery: nobody can state for sure that such practice is an illegal one. The point is that nobody has proofs that Nvidia has really seeded shills into forums to praise Nvidia products, denounce ATI products or proclaim pro-Nvidia statements.
There are no clear examples of how allegedly “paid” fans should behave themselves in the forums. There are no clear guidelines what they should state to other hardware users. There are even no examples of organized black-PR campaigns within hardware communities (there is no point to organize such campaigns in forums of not very technically-savvy users due to natural reasons and it is not hard to track down traces of such campaigns if there are any). Finally, there are no “ex-fans” admitting charges and too many “anonymous” posters in this story.
There is also a pretty wise point my by Derek Perez in an email he asked not to publish: people within communities have enough knowledge to easily dissect members who post claims that favour one side and denounce another. By contrast, Nvidia says it has helped its clients by determining their needs by asking hardware enthusiasts, a fair and open practice.
Without any real proofs that Nvidia really does something unethical, any accusations of the company sound rather boring and pathetic. Moreover, selling hardware for gamers, even using all available methods, may hardly offend anybody for real.
Some Thoughts
There are several things that we should note, even though they may not have direct relations to unproved accusations of Nvidia Corp. in forming squads that address the communities.
There is insufficient amount of information about graphics technologies, specifications of graphics chips and technical background of currently existing products. This is why Nvidia has to have its “voices” within the communities to have some things explained. Given that comments made by third parties are unofficial, hardware companies carry no responsibility for them. We do know that ATI’s staff talks to the community without hiding in, for example, forums at Beyond3D .
Nvidia puts a lot of efforts into development of communities: the most obvious examples are Nzone and SLIZone web-sites that help the company’s customers to fully utilize potential of their hardware. This type of community support deserves an indisputable credit: “cultivated” enthusiasts help other enthusiasts to solve problems in a forum which is hypothetically moderated by professionals who are supposed to help. Perhaps, AEG helped to establish these two web-sites as well?
In case any company would like to avoid accusations of conspiracy and exaggerating drawbacks of its products in the forums, it has to be very open publicly in regards all of the peculiarities of the hardware developed and made. Evidently, advertisements of the technology advancements should be as detailed as possible to avoid unpleasant surprises and misunderstandings by the end-user. Unfortunately, there is an amount of reverse engineering in any product launched these days, hence, some things will have to be resolved on the field – within actual user communities.
There is also not enough information from game developers: the only two companies that discuss their technologies very openly with the media are Croteam and Valve Software. Others cannot be reached by the hardware community at all, which is why there are a lot of controversial information available about game engines around the Web.
Finally, all hardware and software companies have to acknowledge: the industry which is starving for the information will feed itself with disinformation by all means. In case you want to save your company from this, you should be open not only on the pleasant topics of winning benchmarks, but on the repulsive topics of losing benchmarks and having other problems. At least, it guarantees that nobody will add something to the existing list of issues and will make an elephant out of a fly.
Any thoughts? Share them in our forums or comments!
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