While scrolling through my Facebook feed last night, I ran across a shared link from a friend highlighting a Technorati article by Andrew Froehlich, Bing: The New King of Search.* Needless to say, I felt compelled to click through… having watched the evolution of Bing since arriving here at Microsoft, I have to say without any bias whatsoever that the decision engine has come a long way. It’s old news now, but I clearly remember this article from ZDNet.com stood out to me when I ran across it; it was the first time I had seen talk of the things Bing was doing right.
One piece that struck me in that article was this:
“Between the two companies, I would wager that Bing is more eager to listen to the requests and constructive criticism of users than Google is right now.”
I obviously can’t speak to Google’s listening practices, but I can tell you that listening and responding to customer feedback is as much a part of the company culture here at Microsoft as bringing in M&Ms to celebrate each passing year with the company. I don’t work directly within the Bing group, so take what I have to say with that knowledge, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that direct customer and partner feedback played a significant role in getting Bing to where it is today.
When I arrived here for my first round of interviews in January of 2007, questioning how the company handles customer feedback was one of the points I needed to be sold on. That discussion was an important one in my evaluation of whether or not I wanted to uproot my family and move clear across the country to accept the role being offered to me. I knew that customer feedback was going to be a deciding factor in whether or not adCenter would sink or swim… what remained to be seen was how committed Microsoft was to collecting and acting upon that feedback.
I’ll admit, I was skeptical: my assumption was, the bigger the company, the higher the likelihood that customer feedback gets lost in the echo chamber (or brushed under the carpet). Obviously the interview team made a convincing enough argument, but I’m also happy to report that not only was I impressed with those answers, I’ve seen the feedback->release process in action for myself.
Some of you may remember about a year ago, I posted thread in the Community forums soliciting adCenter feedback. Know what happened to that feedback? It was collected, categorized and populated in the adCenter Feature Suggestion forum, managed by the Customer and Partner Experience team (yes, there’s an entire group dedicated to listening to your feedback). That’s why you’ll see some entries were added by the Microsoft Advertising Community team – those were the asks that were gathered from that forum thread. If you sort the info there by the "Status" dropdown, you can see all the requests that have been marked as "Completed". But I digress…
The entire point I wanted to make with this article was not only to give a nod to some positive press for Bing -- the more people using Bing means increased potential for you to capture some of that traffic volume with your adCenter campaigns -- but to highlight a couple of helpful Bing resources for webmasters too.
Now, before I forget… I’m going to go set a reminder on my calendar to have 5lbs of M&Ms on hand at the office come March 26th.
Thanks!
Tina