The Social Media Minute for October 15, 2010

Bing Rings Up Facebook For Social Media-Flavored Searches

Microsoft's latest announcement regarding Bing and Facebook's integration further solidifies the presence social media as a legitimate marketing initiative for businesses.

“What if your search engine could somehow bring in the people you trust most?” That is the question posed at the beginning of a video demonstrating the integration announced this week of Microsoft’s Bing search engine and Facebook, currently dominating computer and movie screens around the world.

The answer, of course, is that Bing can now do just that: it may still be running a distant third to Google, but suddenly it has access to the likes and dislikes of the internet’s most popular recommendation engine. And that means the fight between Google and Facebook for web dominance of the early 21st century just got much more interesting for companies of all sizes and their social media marketing strategists.

“There are two reasons this announcement is such a big deal,” says Splash Media principal and co-founder Paul Slack, a 20-year veteran of internet marketing. “First, it highlights the emergence and potential dominance of the ‘social web’ against old-school ‘content web’ sites like Google.  Second, it now forces companies to consider how social media marketing is going to play a role in their online marketing strategies.  I believe this announcement also brings more clarity to the feud between Facebook and Google.”

To be fair, Google had been incorporating real-time social media content through blogs and Twitter into its search results. But Facebook’s 500-million members offers a powerful database for Bing that companies must take into account. And we’re not just talking about whether your friends liked a certain movie, restaurant or news story; a video that’s being passed around from friend to friend like a bottle of elderberry wine will now do a better job of capturing Bing’s attention.

It’s exhibit number 3,254 in a rapidly-growing argument that social media is here to stay and will play a major role in how companies brand themselves online, how they communicate with customers/employees and how they differentiate themselves from competitors. Facebook and Google may slug themselves silly in this search and social media deathmatch, but make no mistake: businesses will be the ultimate winners.