We expressed why Bing’s new social search functionality was so revolutionary through social music. Bing invited people to create the first playlists automatically sourced from what their Facebook friends were listening to on Spotify. With a click, playlists generate from your friends’ top 40 artists.

Each playlist is unique to each individual as the songs are automatically selected from only your friends’ music. These Bing branded, socially sourced playlists are easily shared with friends via social media and email and are publically accessible within Spotify. By adding this functionality, over 5x as many people created branded playlists than average.

All of these factors – social, search, music – converged when Spotify arrived in the U.S. in late 2011. Millennials were quick to latch onto this service that revolves around digitally sharing music and playlists you are listening to with friends in real time across Spotify and Facebook. Previously, if you wanted to create a Spotify playlist based on what your friends were listening to, you could do so only by manually adding each individual song. Bing changed that by inviting people to create custom playlists automatically sourced from the music their Facebook friends were listening to. With one simple click, a playlist generates from your friends’ top 40 artists. Each playlist is unique to each individual as the songs are automatically selected from your friends’ listening habits only. These Bing branded, socially sourced playlists are easily shared with friends via social media and email and are publically accessible within Spotify.

By creating a fan-sourced award that tapped into the power of sharing, we helped catapult Bing’s social equity. Fans cast 54 million votes using nominee-specific hashtags in 6 days with 21.2 Million occurring in first 48 hours, breaking previous records of fan engagement with the VMAs. Bing received 31.8 Million mentions of #Bing in one week and 4.2 Million additional earned impressions from @Bing mentions and retweets, including from Justin Bieber. The show became the #1 most commented on cable program of the year, even beating out the Super Bowl, America’s largest sporting event on network TV.