Bing's season of goodwill...

I'm a big fan of Bing as a decision making engine. I like the daily images, the way it works, and particularly the image search.

Whilst Bing have somewhere in the region of 10% share of the US market, I read somewhere recently that in the UK, that figure is still only 3%, but that they are planning a big offensive soon.

Maybe it's entirely co-incidental, (but the marketing cynic in me says probably not), but I've noticed in the last week 2 interesting Bing initiatives:

1) Bing are giving away virtual currency "Farm Cash" for Farmville players on Facebook if you join their fan page. With a gazillion players of Farmville in the world, this has already added tons of Fans to Bing's Facebook page.   I  read this great article on the Bing / Farmville Fan initiative so I'll just point you over there rather than recap, but to put it in context, on Monday they had 100k fans, by Tuesday, 400k and today it stands at 593k. Nice.  Let's hope they do something useful with us all. I am running a crusade against using pure fan numbers as a measure of success on Facebok pages at the minute. So naive. So shortsighted. Grrrr.

2) They are giving 5p to UK Charity Sport Relief / Comic Relief for every 10 searches made under an initiative called "Give with Bing", and provide you with a little downloadable app / counter to keep track of the contributions you are making.

So as I've written about before recently regarding the Hula Hoops Sport Relief initiative, hooking up with a charity is a great way to make people think well of your brand, and in this case it's unlikely to actually cost Bing a lot either:

I did a little maths:  With the average UK search user performing 148 searches a month (according to a Comscore report from November 09), if you switched entirely to using Bing for a month, they'd have to give a not hugely generous 74p to the charity. And if they only have 3% of the search market right now in the UK that's not going to break the bank.
 
That said if it's that easy to make the world a better place get yourself over to Bing right now and download the counter. No excuses now!

Nice initiatives on both counts, but I'd give them more points if they actually made their Give with Bing site work in Firefox. No excuses for that these days.