Before You Put Your Product In An Influencer’s Hands, Make Sure It Kicks Ass

If you were watching CNN on Election Night last week, you may have caught this embarrassing flub:

CNN commentators using Microsoft @surface tablets as iPad stand. Facepalm. pic.twitter.com/BPxWTf2zhI

— Adam (@adamUCF) November 5, 2014

There was the Surface, one of Microsoft’s biggest consumer products of the last few years, reduced to a kickstand for its chief competitor, Apple’s iPad. (The fact that Microsoft mocked the iPad’s lack of a kickstand in one of its ads for the Surface makes things even worse.)

I don’t know if those Surfaces were there via any sort of corporate sponsorship arrangement. If they were—shit; and if they weren’t, that still sucks.

Either way, it offers a cautionary tale for marketers who are looking to influencers to help promote a product: Before you put that product out there, you’d better make sure it’s damn good. Because while being outright ridiculed or ignored is bad in their own rights, being reduced to a prop for the competition may be even worse.