Today Facebook announced its partnership with Microsoft, making Bing’s search more social.
The first phase that’s rolling out is featuring Facebook module in Bing that shows you what your friends have liked related to your search. For example, when you search for restaurants, it shows you which restaurants your friends have liked. Or if you search on movies, it lists your friends’ “liked” movies.
Bing also takes on Facebook’s friend suggestion feature, showing Bing users the people who are related to them first when they search on a person’s name. From the search page, you can directly add the displayed people on your Facebook or send them a message.
With such integration, product marketing strategy has shifted to even more community centric. A growing number of shoppers search online to find the highest rating and best comments about products they want before their purchases. Now with the circle of friends helping to make the decisions, companies definitely need to invest a lot more into keeping their online presence nice and clean. Online advertising now includes the social media circle. Social media marketing is growing fast.
And now, Bing the “decision maker” seems to make a lot more sense.
“The Social Network,” a movie that depicts the start of Facebook, portrays how Mark Zuckerberg may have stolen the idea for his company from his fellow Harvard students. The movie is coming out on Oct 1, which Mr. Zuckerberg “had no plan to see”. Maybe he will like “The Social Network” parody from Babelgum and Landline.TV more?
I like cooking at home but I also enjoy eating out once in a while. More so for tryng out new restaurants in and out of town. In this social networking era, it’s rarely random restaurant picking anymore. I do my research before heading out or even when I am already out, there are apps to tell me what’s around and the community can let me know their rating. Yelp.com is what I use most of the time. Its iPhone app shows restaurants around me and I can filter specific criteria as I like. I find that very useful when you are not familiar with the area and by reading users’ comments, you know what you should pick from the menu. One thing I found though, is that there are more angry people in the Internet community than happy people. People who have bad experience with a business tend to be louder with their comments. So keep that in mind when you read through them.
Another apps that I also use when I am out is Foursquare. It is a weird concept to me at first what the purpose of the app is but it gets users addicted to checking into places just to get some badges and status. Then I started seeing promotions from stores for people who checkin. What a great promotion idea! It’s definitly beneficial to both sellers and consumers. With the power of the online commnity, you can just find out all businesses around you. You can checkout tips from people for any places. Again, another way to get to know your area more.
Today Facebook announced its partnership with Microsoft, making Bing’s search more social.
