Recognizing that teeing-up perception of the new OS is critical to its initial success, Microsoft itself decided to stoke the fires on Twitter as a part of its marketing effort.  There was the #winwin7 campaign and other attempts by Microsoft as part of its multi-faceted campaign. @rupalparekh over at AdvertisingAge (@adage) covered the moves pretty thoroughly.  So we’ve been tracking sentiment against Windows 7 for several months now.  After all we’re interested in what people are really thinking (and saying on Twitter).

So it’s with a little surprise (and reaffirmation of the importance of what we’re doing here at review’d) to see what we Microsoft has up as its home page today for launch.  Check it out:

Microsoft's home page on Oct. 22, 2009

Cheers to Microsoft for bringing users statements to the forefront!  But are they?  A couple of searches on featured tweets yielded no results in Twitter’s own search engine.  That doesn’t mean they didn’t exist (tweets are purged out of search over time unless you indicate the specific date range).  Still, if Microsoft is featuring “real-time” reviews for marketing efforts, the tweets better be fresh.  Jury is still out on whether or not this one is a little too stale:

Windows 7 tweet citation fail

Seriously though, what are people really saying about Windows 7?  Dare we believe the editors behind this revolving feed of rainbows, unicorns and 100% positive reviews? Here’s the latest from review’d:

Oct. 21-22, 2009

The numbers on the above graph are as follows: 226 tweets total (131 positive and 95 negative for a 58% positive hurrah on launch day so far). I’d say reviews are a little more skeptical than Microsoft would lead you to believe.  Still, people can be pretty harsh out there on the interwebs, shrouded in anonymity and separated by screens and input devices.  Here are some verbatims we collected from the two camps.

First on the positive side:

Positive tweets as tracked by review'd

Thanks to @mattymax, @Ducky11, and @troymccabe for the above tweets.

And on the other side of the fence:

Negative tweets as tracked by review'd

Credit to @tweeetosaurus, @djDeficit, and @jimtac for their words of wisdom.

Fact of the matter is that an aggregate of these messages helps to create an aura about a product.  It’s intensified by the consumption quantity (followers receiving) and authority level of the originator – something that Microsoft has reduced down to “Twitter User” in its questionable citations.

In this little journey through Microsoft’s marketing today, we also found this fun little feed to help visitors understand “What people are saying about Windows 7.”  It pulls in reviews and discussions from all the fun sources such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, and an RSS blog feed.  To join the conversation, you tag your message or content with #win7, #windows and the like.  So we sat and watched the stream for a good bit of time waiting for anything negative to come through…zilch.

Microsoft, if you want to play fair in social media, censoring (if that indeed is what you’re doing) is off-limits.  For the rest of us, the best piece of advice today might be to just take a peek at the same hash tags within Twitter’s search or set up a column in TweetDeck to get the unfiltered truth.