Marketing Matters

I’ll confess that my original title for this post was “It’s Cool, It’s Useful, It Makes Life Simpler – It’s from Microsoft???” Like most people, I’ve done my fair share of Microsoft bashing. After all, I use Vista, so that’s really no surprise. But I have to give credit where credit is due: Bing is really cool, very useful and even pretty.

Haven’t heard of Bing yet? It’s designed to do to Google what Google did to AltaVista  – lay it to waste by making life exponentially easier for the people who use it.

Bing’s introductory video does a good job at making it clear that this is a serious tool designed with the user in mind. That’s great, of course, but for me, though, what stands out the most is the approach Microsoft is taking with its marketing. The thing that impresses me is that it’s so thorough: they employed standard big-brand tactics like issuing a press release and doing a tradeshow launch, but then they created an interesting video that informs you about Bing’s functionality pleasantly in less than 3 minutes, and they make it easy for you to follow their progress on Twitter and Facebook.

As if that weren’t already an exceptional marketing program, they went and did it all really well. The video lets you know exactly why you should care and why we’re all probably going to end up using Bing. It elicits more “oh cool!” and “hey, look at this” reactions than most campaigns. The social media pages have actual information on them. And the site itself is sleek and well-designed.

I want to make it clear that I’m not just swooning for no good reason. I’m swooning for two good reasons: first, Microsoft really rose to the occasion in marketing Bing well. Second, it’s actually good.

To my friends in Redmond, my hat is off to you. Thanks for the pleasant surprise.