On Digital Partnerships: Facebook and Bing

For years, we’ve gotten used to building up our loyalties around one side or the other of the major players in the digital game. Are you a PC or a Mac? Do you use Google or Bing?

But in this time of ever-overlapping mobile, TV, search, and social worlds, rivalries are no longer so clearly defined—it’s not search vs. search, or hardware vs. hardware. It doesn’t really matter that Apple and Google are companies that manufacture totally different products—they are competitors because they share the same consumers, expansive aims, and innovative mentality. Ditto Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, Verizon, and other digital products that you use on a regular basis. In 2010, it’s all about partnerships, staying relevant, and looking forward.

With this said, any digital partnership should really be evaluated on the basis of not just what it means for the consumer, but what it means for the companies that have been excluded from the partnership. And it is through this lens that we examine the latest: Bing and Facebook, together at last.

A partnership between Bing and Facebook is good for both of them, mostly because it excludes Google. Google has made it clear that they are looking to expand into the social space. It makes competitive sense for Facebook to expand into the search space. And put simply, it’s much easier to expand into search than it is to expand into social, since creating a pervasive social network on Facebook’s scale is nearly impossible. This partnership was a good business decision.

What does this mean for the consumer? Well, let’s stop and think about the importance of search. For most web users, search is the internet. Search is our digital transportation system – the road that gets us where we need to go on the internet.

Bing is very much the number 2 player in the search game. Though Bing has constantly proven itself to be more innovative in search than Google (even forcing Google to play catch up with features in image search, and on their homepage…) it’s hard to usurp a company that has become so integrated into our habits. Google has recently made headlines by integrating Twitter results into its search. But by partnering with the socially-dominant Facebook, Bing takes the “social-search” concept to another level. Clearly, if social search is appealing to you, Bing is the way to go. Your friends’ “likes” will pop up if you search for “restaurant in the East Village,” and who wouldn’t want that, right?

Um, we guess. There’s something about search that seems like it should be objective, even if it’s not. If search is a roadmap to the internet, shouldn’t it quietly point you in this direction or that one, without your entire social network standing jumping and cheering you over to the right?

Maybe we’re overreacting. Your search results will otherwise stay the same, we assume, and with SEO fully in place, it’s not like search was ever really an objective roadmap. Search has always been “smart.” And if your Facebook friends are people whose opinion you trust, your search just got smarter.