SEOBing Wants to Socialize Shopping Experience

Bing Wants to Socialize Shopping Experience

Bing Shopping’s integration into Facebook and Twitter moves forward another step; its now offering the ability to request opinions from friends and family through a tweet or a Facebook post before making a purchasing decision.

Bing shopping 2.jpg

Test Drive Time
On its blog, Bing Shopping suggests to try out one product, which of course I ignored to fetch my own bounty. A 52″ LCD TV it will be. The brand has been removed from the following screenshots for fairness.

This is what it looks like:

Bing shopping test Samsung LCD TV.JPG

Then onto the sharing process…on Facebook:

Bing shopping test share Facebook.JPG

…and on Twitter

Bing shopping test share Twitter.JPG

Facebook Share Option
I’m really of two minds on how useful this is. On the one hand, it provides full information readily accessible to the friends I would want to consult. It’s easy and only takes one click and a couple of nice sentences to invite friends to share their views.
On the other hand, no matter how nicely phrased the advice request is, such a post on my wall is just turning my personal interface into an ad for the TV maker – and Bing, for that matter. Would my friends consider this spam?

Twitter Share Option
It’s easy and there’s not much to say there as it all – again- will depend on your nice little request sentence to your followers.

Conspicuous Consumption
Do I really want to share my purchase decision process with ALL my Twitter followers? How many followers do you have? Evidently, this request for help would only work if you could send it to a targeted group of people.

The same goes with the Facebook share. However, there you can just click on “Send as message instead” and pick your shopping buddies. Yet, why bother when you can do exactly the same via e-mail? I guess it saves you having to copy and paste the link as well as the product name. Perhaps the button is better for sharing via mobile apps.

This is exactly what the email share function offers: it directly pastes the product’s name and corresponding URL into your text body. And you just have to enter your request and e-mail addresses.

On a more serious note, what are the implications of sharing your purchasing intent on Facebook? Will that then be readily available to anyone around the globe doing a search on you on the Web? No thank you. If this is the case with the Open Graph API, I would rather not and just keep my Internet persona to myself.

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