BING gets the ‘Thumbs-Up’
Posted by Steve Elliott on Fri, May 27, 2011
Last week Vovici launched Vovici Social for Facebook. This week Microsoft launched several new search features in Bing that will leverage the wealth of user data from Facebook. As the business world furiously works to find useful ways to leverage social data, these new features in Bing warrant a second look. Bing integrates Facebook user data in three new ways:
- Bing will now reorder search results based on things that your friends "like" in Facebook.
- In addition, Bing will also match information from your friends’ profiles during a search. For example, if you search for "The Hangover Part II", a movie set to release next week, you may see friends who have said that this is a movie they pla
n to see. This feature will modify and enhance the search based on your friends profile information versus their “likes” in Facebook.
- Third, Bing can show information based on the total number of “likes” collected for the topic. This data would include “likes” from people you may not be friends with.
It remains to be seen how useful these features will be within Bing but the direction is clear. Social data will be increasingly used in more complex and intelligent ways to try and determine what a user is looking for or to infer what a user may be thinking.
This trend holds true with Voice of the Customer initiatives as well. We see increasing demand for complex views that combine unstructured data from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn with structured data from panels, surveys and communities. It is great to see this move from a “nice-to-have” to a functionality that VOC programs value as an important data feed. This aspect of VOC is in its infancy but it is clearly developing as a powerful source of customer feedback.