The best opening slide of any panel at SXSW 2010 goes to BING:

As of March 2010, BING has 11.5% share (and growing) of the U.S. search market – which is a fairly big deal. So, how did they convince people that they needed Bing?

“We knew people were really happy with Google. So we asked ourselves, ‘How can we introduce a product that no body thinks they need?’, began Stefan Weitz (Director of Search at Microsoft). For the first time, the team fearlessly dove into these types of questions in a public panel: what followed was a degree of candor and humanness that’d I don’t think anyone would ever associate with Microsoft.

Bing and Farmville

Bing used a Cost-Per-Engagement (CPE) model (as opposed to the traditional CPM model) as a way to engage with their audience:

The fact is, more people use Farmville than Twitter. And they use in a different way, “more like a drug”. This gave the Bing team the idea to use the Farmville platform as a way to tell people about Bing. So, in exchange for learning a little bit about Bing, they offered fans some extra Farmville cash.

Bing’s results from using a CPE model with Farmville:

• Over 72% of users who clicked on the engagement became fans
• 59,000 users published the story to their newsfeed, extending the message across their network.
• Over 70,070 clicks were received on published feeds; on average each published story received more than 1 click.
• We received 400,000 new fans on Facebook within the first 24 hours

“The amount of engagement and feedback we received just from this community was enormous, because these people got exposed to us in a way that mattered to them. We’re not necessary moving past the CPM model, but there is something very important about cost per engagement”, explained the team.

Bing #Win, Big #Fail

The Bing team told stories of their triumphs: like the Bing Jingle Contest which was “something we just did as a lark”, yet resulted in a swarm of great press. #Win

But shortly after, when a group of high schoolers planned to perform the Bing jingle, the Bing team “innocently” shipped them a box of tshirts. Weitz explained the problem, “We saw this as an opportunity to engage with these students, but we went over the line. It felt inauthentic and overproduced. And when the video surfaced on Youtube we received a lot of negative press.” #Fail

5 Social Marketing Lessons From The Launch of Bing

1) You know nothing. Social media is one of the wackiest eco systems in the world, comparable to when the butterfly flaps its wing. The media circles that we gave the most attention to weren’t the same ones that gave us the most coverage and exposure.

2) When you screw up. Admit it quickly. Bing tweeted an ad for Victoria Secret’s mentioning that the girls were giving “VD advice” (Valentine’s day?). “What would have been a PR disaster 10 years ago, was covered up in 10 minutes by apologizing: ‘Oops! Our mistake.’ We laughed along with the Twittersphere and they calmed down.”

3) Have personality. As an example they give Zappos’ amazingly funny Social Media Guru video.

4) People want stories, not feature lists. The Bing team received an email from a 100-year old Cardiologist in Florida which read,”I want to thank you for naming your search engine after me.” To which they thought, “Well, clearly this person is crazy.” They followed up on the story, and met with Dr. Bing in Florida, only to find that not only was he unbelievably sane, but full of fascinating stories. The team went on to commission a documentary about his life which was shown at Sundance last year.

5) Give a Shit. People know when you’re not being authentic. People know when you’re pitching them.

The BING panel at SXSW: Aaron Lilly, Lynn Girotto, Stefan Weitz, Ian Schafer

Slides are available on SlideShare.

More information about the BING panel can be found on the SXSW site.