Eighteen months ago we started out with a hunch and a dream about a different kind of approach to social media, one that focuses on enchantment and engagement rather than influence and reach (although don’t get me wrong, they’re both nice too).
We knew we could do more, and more importantly, we knew that if we were to establish a social presence worthy of the incredible opportunity presented by Bing in the UK, we’d need to do something different. So, we decided to stop… and LISTEN. It was then that we discovered we were talking too much about ourselves and that we needed to change our approach.
Today, as we look back at the last eighteen months and prepare for the next set of challenges, it’s an incredible view – we’ve transformed our social presence into a vibrant tribe of loyal followers and intrigued searchers, we strive to be known as a human, authentic voice, presenting the very best principles of social media to a growing audience, in a fun, engaging and informative way.
This week we were rated as one of the top 100 social brands by an initiative organised by top UK social brand agency Headstream. Let’s be clear, we ranked at #76 out of 100 but before you fob this off as one of those self-congratulating, vomit inducing, smarmy industry insider backslapping thank-you notes, let me just embellish a little as to why this is more important to us than you might initially think.
1) We never set out to win awards or even get noticed by “the industry”, we just wanted to be pure about our approach to social focusing on our audience not ourselves
2) We were up against global brands in a UK run initiative. Our score was for Bing UK not Bing global or US. We stood against people like Starbucks, KLM and Ford as well as shoulder to shoulder with leading UK brands like Innocent (they won), Virgin and Cadburys. This alone is huge for us – we don’t have a tribe of bazillions of followers, but we still got noticed and made the cut.
So congratulations are well and truly in order – given that (rather unusually) this success is on my watch, I wanted to make sure that you, our audience understand how important you have been to our journey and how much we appreciate you.
So thank you, the people who wake up every day, look at our homepage and then talk to us about it, those of you who share our love of terrible jokes about cheese, llamas or whatever bizarre meme we might have going at any point in time. You may have previously thought that Microsoft is your typical faceless, corporate monolith, but you at least now know this – that there is a small team of people here at Bing towers that love you very, very much (but not in that way, that would just be weird).
We have much, much more planned for the coming months – stick with us and let’s have some more fun!
Cheers for now
Dave
Director of Search, Bing UK
@dcoplin