How Fair Is It To Lure People into Criticizing a Competitor with Prizes?

Sometimes I just fail to understand motivation behind various things that online companies do in terms of marketing and promotion – to the extent that I can’t help but come up with yet another rant about this or that action. I know that criticizing is always easier than doing something yourself but I still have a reason for my rants because sometimes I get emails from startups to thank me for writing a post like this one because they will not make such a mistake themselves now. So please, forgive me yet another rant – I just could not resist it.

Today I have seen yet another email in my inbox that invited me to do something to win a MacBook. In fact, it was two notebooks – one for the winner and the second one for his or her friend. I have to admit it, I have never in my life won anything so whenever I am offered to participate in some sweepstake, I usually jump on the bandwagon and hope to win something.

In fact, I don’t expect I will ever win anything because I am probably just not the right person to get something for free but out of curiosity and stubbornness I keep collecting labels, entering various codes online and sending code words to manufacturers of various products. And I can’t even imagine how many of my business cards have been collected by various web companies at conferences as they promised I would enter a competition to win something.

At that many of my loyal readers know that I am not even an Apple fan and every time I choose a new notebook, I keep considering a Macbook but buying a PC. Yet when something is offered for free, I can’t resist it so I kept reading the email offering me a chance to win two Apple notebooks. And I was more than disappointed when I learned exactly what I was supposed to do for a chance to win them.

So the email arrived from Box.net, an online files sharing service that is definitely a simple one to use and is one of the market leaders in its field. And here I definitely can’t imagine what the motivation was for their marketing department to come up with an ugly idea like this: to get a chance to win the two MacBooks their users are invited to share their experience of Box.net and compare it with cumbersome experience with SharePoint on Twitter – using #SharePointBlues hashtag.

I have already mentioned here that last time I used Box.net, I felt more than just frustration. At that I have never been a SharePoint user anyway but I used to love the simplicity behind Box.net online sharing tool: when you only need to exchange a couple of large files every few months, it made perfect sense to stick to their service.

But when they last suggested that I either wait 12 hours for my two files (a total of 8 Mb) to upload to their servers or upgrade to a premium plan – it just did not sound right to me and I easily found an alternative that let me do everything for free and quickly. Now I have never objected to paying for online services that I needed for business or pleasure but since I rarely used Box.net (or any file sharing service) at all, paying for this rare usage to be more or less acceptable just did not sound right.

But of course it is no wonder that you will easily find numerous users posting their opinions (fair?) about how good Box.net is versus SharePoint – for a chance to win two Macbooks for the best tweet of the week. I am sure Box.net will enjoy some exposure on Twitter over the month that this campaign is running but it is still good to see some users who ask Box.net to stay “classy” and stop slating SharePoint by offering prizes to people.

Now I totally agree that sharing should be simple (just like any other activity that is intended to increase one’s productivity) and that some tools are certainly simpler than others, but this particular campaign is just plain ugly and acting in a manner that Microsoft usually acts in is hardly what one expects a friendly (and simple) web service to do.