If you had a $500M launch budget for a product that nearly everyone was going to have to buy eventually anyway, how much emphasis would you place on word-of-mouth marketing? Microsoft is in that position, and yet thinks the role of influencers is important enough that they're sending Vista-equipped laptops to selected bloggers.

Over the past two weeks I've seen countless TV pundits lambast TIME Magazine's choice of 'You' (as in user-generated) as the 'Person of the Year'. It wasn't hard to understand how a bunch of journalists (mostly in their 50's and 60's) would take the idea too literally, look at YouTube and get confused, and think the editors at TIME had fallen off their rocker.

I wonder if these same folks would have an easier time if they tried to get their heads around the fact that this year, unlike years gone by, Microsoft thinks that a key to the launch of their billion dollar + product is a dozen or so guys with blogs but not many (mostly 1000 or way less) readers.

The internet connected people, blogs gave them a voice, and syndication and other 'web2.0' technologies help rank and then magnify certain of those voices. It's a massive simplification but it's also true. That would be important enough, but now that the traditional media puts their huge magnifying glass in front of those who first gain influence online, the power of one person and a blog is nearly unimaginable.

Microsoft probably spent less than $100K on this exercise. If they'd have chosen to spend $1M it probably would have been a wise decision.

More interesting is the question of how businesses without $500M take advantage of these changes. We're spending more and more time thinking about this as we continue to see large and increasingly urgent opportunity for our clients in the world of blogs, communities, and word of mouth.

Sidebar: The blog-nannies are calling the laptops payolla and predicting a major backlash. This will help balance things out, proving you can write a blog and be both wrong and non-influential too.

Update: Scoble thinks it's good. Microsoft sends out a very silly request to 'give the laptop away or send it back', and other opinions emerge. The circus is in town.