I don’t want to go overboard on Bing so two posts in two days about the search engine is probably more than enough. However, I couldn’t ignore an article from WebProNews about Bing’s activities on Facebook. Do you consider their activities to be a form of social media marketing?

Microsoft (there – I have got away from Bing) have established a discussions page on Facebook asking for feedback on the types of features users would like to see on their new search engine. The answers have ranged from the ridiculous to the, well ridiculous. However, I am not here to discuss whether or not Bing’s search engine works. What I am interested in is the social media marketing aspects of their approach.

I asked in the first paragraph whether or not you thought this was social media marketing. In my mind, everything – and I do mean everything, that you do online has a marketing potential. Microsoft have used an old ploy to promote their new toy – the old ploy, using public opinions to promote their products.

Are they doing it successfully? According to all the feedback and the discussions that they have generated – most definitely. Creating a discussions page on Facebook can be a great way to generate ‘talk’ about your product. Of course, you have to be prepared to take the good with the bad, you may find that, at times, the ‘talk’ goes downhill and you are seeing more negatives than positives – you take the good with the bad.

This is almost the ultimate in social media marketing. Release a product, create a discussion page to get user feedback on improvements or changes and then hope the discussion moves beyond those pages. It has worked for Microsoft and many others. Can you make it work for your business?

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 14th, 2009 at 1:29 pm and is filed under Social Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.