Sharing Photographs on Bing
The Power of Bing
Bing has a higher proportion of business users than Google. This leads to a lower payment per click for well-placed advertising and a slightly more focused audience.
Even the home users using Bing seem to be more purchase focused. So, if you sell anything, take Bing seriously.
How to Share Images
To make your image available to Bing you need either a Flickr account or an EveryScape Eats account.
Geotag your photo.
Publish your photograph under your company name, ensuring that it is geotagged and the image geotagging is set to allowed.
Set the image to one of these creative commons license settings:
(1) Attribution Creative Commons — all modifications OK and free to use, even commercially. Modifications can be released under a different licence.
(2) Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons — can be modified, but must be released under the same or similar licence.
(3) Attribution-NoDerivs Creative Commons — can not be modified, but may be shared freely with attribution.
The Advantage
Businesses need to take advantage of this tool. Think about the information you want to know about any business. What is the focus of your questions?
Most searches about businesses relate to:
offered services and/or products
quality of services or products
location
business appeal or rating (how they look, are the staff friendly, etc.)
delivery methods or capacity
stock information
community involvement
When it comes to searching using Google or Bing photographs can answer queries about what they offer, business appeal, location, quality of product, and community involvement without words. Bing used a technology called Spatial Search to make it so that clients looking on Streetside could find these answers. This is a huge advantage, clients that have a reason to click, such as an appealing photograph or clear description, are much more likely to take the time to investigate further.
The Drawbacks
Unfortunately, the use of the feature that searches for and overlays photos on Bing is spotty. Even their own blog site has troubles displaying the images.
Further, Silverlight, a huge part of the technology required by Bing’s Street Side, is under threat of retirement. Oddly, the redesigns have continued to include Silverlight. This makes me question Microsoft’s desire to retire the Silverlight certification.
At least one of the TED Talks videos about the feature have been made private as well. Thankfully the TED Talks main site backed it up. It also appears that a few private individuals made a copy. I’m not sure if this is because the employee responsible for some of this design jumped ship to Google. It would seem unlikely since this feature was release after he jumped ship.
However, free advertising is worth it even when it is spotty.
