SMM: Bing’s Treasure Map creates Hunters on Facebook

Bing latest endeavours, is the lucrative and unquestionably expensive internet marketing strategy for the rapper, Jay Z, upcoming book called ‘Decoded’ published by Random House. Utilising their alliance with Facebook, they are attracting fans on Facebook to a treasure hunt to find pieces of the book in the virtual world and the real world, mainly in London and New York.

The concept of the campaign derived from the memoir’s title, ‘Decoded’, which aspires to get fans from around the worlds to unearth and decode all the pages of the book before its release next month. The processes of the treasure hunt consist of a multi-platform search experience and interactive game. For instance a user will need to go on bing.decodejay-z.com and enter the contest, which also uses the search engine map to find locations of the pages. 

The indications on Bing to the pages are all relevant to the artist’s career and music. However, if you find that you do not know some of the answers, Bing has placed a search box under the response box to help those unbeknownst to the answers.

Facebook users can access 'join the hunt' by just accessing the “Decode Jay-Z with Bing” page, and additionally the Jay-Z and Bing Facebook pages give out clues to participants.

Bing’s communication director explicates the marketing strategy as a method to create a connection with the artist’s fans base and the search engine because findings from their research defined plenty of them as being ‘heavy searches’, "So we can reach this audience with a really engaging experience that hits a topic they're passionate about and it's a great way to build affinity for Bing."(Lisa Gurry)

She also mentions that this being Bing’s first interactive game, it is somehow a test runner, and based on the amount of users interacting on the platform (decoded Jay-Z site) with outline Bing future attempt in similar projects.

This venture is indisputably grand in various scales and very well coordinated with potentially lucrative results. Both the artist and Bing are getting plenty of publicity from the campaign, however separately Bing is getting more traffic from it and the artist is also getting his royalties.

This type of social media marketing is exceptional for a business, the exposure is massively great and the interactions with the users are highly beneficial. Pipon could advise and guide a company in this type of endeavour by developing a marketing analysis of the business’s image on a social media spectrum.