Many of you may have seen in the news the recent discussions about the Windows 7 Launch Party strategy. Here is the brief: Microsoft decides to offer people who want to celebrate the arrival of Windows 7 an option to host their own house party to do it (http://www.houseparty.com/ ). Now on the face this seems like a pretty innovative approach - very interesting, very viral - and in fact, when you go to the YouTube page for their house party (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cX4t5-YpHQ ) you see almost a million page views. However ratings and comments are turned off for this page at the moment.
Why is this interesting? Well, for one, I have been waiting for Windows 7 for so long that at this point I would definitely throw a party to get it on my laptop (but that is Eric the geek). This is also interesting as a case study for how community practitioners inside and outside enterprises use strategies to engage our audiences. It is good to try and use innovative strategies to attract users, but how do you take risks when there are people out there who might want to criticize your every move? The house party idea has receieved some bad press in the media and perhaps the disabling of ratings and comments on the YouTube page is related to that. The interesting piece to think about is, as enterprises/ institutions managing our reputations, how do we balance innovation and the possibility of things going badly.