We’re not sure what to think of VMware Team Fusion’ latest contest. If you upload a one-minute video about your experience in switching to VMware Fusion in order to run Windows on your Mac, or you write a blog post about it, you can win a set of prizes ranging from t-shirts, bumper stickers and an iPod Touch to a MacBook Air.
On itself, it’s just a nice, harmless marketing campaign to increase awareness about VMware Fusion on video sharing sites and gain extra backlinks for obvious reasons (might have something to do with the increasing pressure from competitors on VMware, aptly written out on bMighty). But we’d be surprised if tons of users go out of their way to create free marketing material for the company, even if the prizes (at least, the Apple products) are bound to spark interest here and there. It just seems it a bit too opportunistic, and they’re putting in an extra threshold by asking contestants to go through a bunch of instructions in a PDF file.
How about you, would you enter a contest to help VMware in getting more awareness for its desktop virtualization solutions?
Hi there!
Thanks for your comment on the “My Switch to VMware Fusion” video and blogging contest.
This is really an experiment in awareness raising. Yes, you are correct that we are asking users to help us spread the word about the product, and we know that this takes time and energy on their part.
However, a lot of our users already share their experience with VMware Fusion on our forums, on their blogs, on Twitter, and more. It’s really what’s helped VMware Fusion come out of the gate so well, and for that, we have our users to thank in large part.
What’s more, every single user who submits a video will get a VMware Fusion t-shirt, which we though would be a good quid-pro-quo for time invested. Again, it’s not a question of “free” so much as making sure that the people making the videos get value out of the exchange.
The goal of this contest is to take what is happening already, people talking about why they’ve switched to VMware Fusion, and give them a megaphone. Because let’s be honest: peer references are the most compelling kind.
As for your criticism of following the instructions in the PDF docs, they really are guidelines, as noted multiple places on the website, and in the doc itself. The goal is to make the blog posts and videos easy to discover, hence the tagging requirement.
Perhaps we need to do a better job to note that those are guidelines, and not draconian requirements.
Thanks again for the comments, and if you’ve switched to VMware Fusion, maybe you can do a little blog post on it yourself ; )
~Pete Kazanjy
VMware Fusion Product Marketing