You would be hard struck to find many people who don’t use Google as their search engine of choice. Bing, Microsoft’s self-declared “decision engine,” is making an innovative strive to take some of Google’s search engine dominance.
Facebook and Bing are now teaming up to integrate the power of Facebook’s “like” feature and pair it with Bing to help you make decisions. Now, when you search something that can correspond to a “like,” Bing will shuffle the items “liked” by your Facebook friends to the top.
This is yet another step toward the incredible future, where the internet is completely personal. This idea, however, is creepy in some instances. Now, more than ever, the internet has invaded you and your friends. The internet can predict what you will like and can influence this by the use of your friends.
Anyone who knows a thing about PR will tell you the absolute best way to influence someone is through a friend. Word of mouth is more influential than billboards or TV ads, because the receiver of the message has their defenses down. More influencial than word of mouth, is word of mouth from your friends. If a friend recommends anything to you, you give it a ton more consideration than from any other source.
Well now, when you inquire about anything via Bing, your friends will literally pop-up and suggest your attention to certain links.
The PR implications are amazingly big here. As far as the internet is concerned, staying relevant is about casting the biggest net you can throw. You can influence your place in search engines from starting blogs, adding tags to pictures and videos, and spreading out your affiliates. Now, you can drive this from Facebook “likes.” Plus, you now have the power to get people’s friends, without their consent, to recommend your product.
An effect of this new integration would be the amount of thought people will start to give to what they “like.” Before when you would just “like” whatever, now could pop up when your Mom searches something.
The potential for this integration to influence people’s decisions is enormous. The personal recommendation from friends is now completely online. The defenses of innocent “searchers” will be down and you will be recommending personally the things you “like” to them.
As far as targeting new markets and personalizing your search optimizations, this is a great way for Bing to engage customers. However, Google already does something similar to this and it is a lot more discrete; you practically don’t even know they are monitoring your searches when they really are (which isn’t exactly a good thing). But, for Bing to take my “likes” from Facebook and then apply those interest from my friends to my internet searches opens many doors to misleading information. Not everything on Facebook is true or representative of my personal interests. I think Bing has a long way to go. Trying to tackle Google and be like it is too big of a hurdle for Bing to jump. I think they should focus on simplifying their site first; it’s just a big mess to me.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Amber that this a a great way for Bing to engage their users via personalizing people's searches. But at the same time, I think taking my "likes" and my friends' "likes" from Facebook and applying them to my searches outside of Facebook is a little creepy. Plus many times on Facebook people aren't really conscious of what they are liking or they just like random things that don't really mean anything. This could cause problems in the truthfulness of what is popping up on their searches. This is a okay attempt to engage users and gain more popularity, but Bing still has a long way to go and a lot of work to do in order to compete with Google.
ReplyDelete