Microsoft

Even if you aren’t as high profile as Microsoft be sure to learn a lesson from their launch of Bing.com… If you are launching a new product and starting a PR or social media campaign be sure the landing page you are sending the traffic has something on it to drive conversions.

You see – Microsoft made a huge mistake in their latest product launch. A week before Microsoft was to launch their latest attempt at a search engine they sent out a press release and CEO Steve Ballmer gave a speech about the new search engine – Bing.com. But if you tried to go to Bing.com after the press release was sent out – it was a blank page.

If this doesn’t raise the “duh” flag for you let’s look at some numbers, via AdAge…

When Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced Bing, his company’s new search engine, last week, it was greeted with the kind of press coverage most internet upstarts can only dream of. Bing was the subject of 1,500 news stories, spent almost a full day on Twitter’s trending-topics list and, per Nielsen Online, accounted for 0.23% of all blog conversations that day (by comparison, the news that Time Warner was officially shedding AOL accounted for 0.05%).

Microsoft quickly took care of the blank page instead creating a well designed landing page that said “Coming Soon” and featured a teaser video. Even that, though, was stupid because it was doing absolutely nothing with the enormous amounts of incoming traffic. According to Compete, last week when the product was announced traffic to Bing accounted for 1.7% of all internet traffic. At least drop a “Notify me when this is availble” email form to start building a list for when you actually do launch. Instead Microsoft sqaundered millions of page views of traffic with a preview video that provided absolutely no engagement or community interaction.

Here’s your lesson. If you are launching a new product and have an accompanying PR or social media campaign – make sure your landing page includes a method of conversion. Include an opt-in email form, a “Twitter this” link, a “follow us” link, a trial evaluation signup – anything to capitalize on the publicity you are creating. If you do nothing with the traffic … what’s the point of your campaign?

Don’t worry though – Microsoft is tossing a $100 million ad campaign for Bing… Do you have that amount of cash to compensate for your PR blunder?

More on Microsoft’s Bing Buzz failure over at AdAge

What do you think? Besides actually having the product ready, how could Microsoft have taken advantage of the gobs of traffic it was getting? Let us know in the comments…

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