From cashback to Live Search club we've been building programs to help increase engagement, usage, and loyalty. Today we're expanding our efforts with the release of SearchPerks!, a new program designed to reward consumers with cool prizes — like frequent flyer miles, Xbox games, and music downloads — just for using Live Search.
To participate, visit http://www.getsearchperks.com/ and download the Perk Counter, a small download that appears as a toolbar in Internet Explorer. The Perk Counter keeps count of your searches using Live Search and awards "tickets" that you can redeem for prizes at the end of the promotion. We award 500 bonus tickets just for downloading and installing the Perk Counter. You'll also earn an additional ticket for each of your queries on Live Search (up to 25 tickets per day).
You can accumulate tickets from the start of SearchPerks! today until the promotion ends on April 15, 2009. Registration will be open through the end of the calendar year.
Get started collecting SearchPerks! tickets for your searches on Live Search today!
Keith Jeffery, Senior Product Manager, Live Search
PingBack from http://searchengineland.com/searchperks-microsoft-new-prizes-for-searches-program-14876.php
Pity only available in the US, only in IE and only on Windows. . .
Does Live Search really suck that bad that they have to bribe people to use it?
Mike-I think the idea is that live search > google, but they have a lot of inertia to overcome. So its bribing people to try something new. But I agree, 99% of the focus should be on improving Live search itself. The users will follow.
When are you going to realize that people outside the US want to be able to play things like this too?
Thank you very much for this program.
I bet that this method will prove to be inefficient.
The solution is to organize great contests of searching-
Google team vs Microsoft team and to demonstrate that
Live Search gives better results, faster. Obviously if you can do it. Perhaps you can start first with MS vs Yahoo, whatever.
Peter
Just want to say that I think this is a great idea. As we all know, half of the battle is product quality and the other half is adoption. I have been using Live Search for quite a while, and I prefer it to Google. I hear people saying "if the product is good, people will use it", but we all know that is not really true. For example, Live image and video searches are significantly better than the google counterparts, in my opinion... but that doesn't mean that any of my coworkers have ever heard of them or seen them.
The Windows Live group seems to understand very well that it is not an either-or choice between improving the product and promoting it. Market share takes time and market share costs money. "If you build it, they will come" does not apply to the business world in general, and especially not search engines.
So I have to say that SearchPerks, CashBack, and Search Club are all great initiatives in my opinion. They represent an innovative new business model that rewards the consumer for behavior that is profitable to the business. They create, if you will, a brand new type of marketplace competition.
"Sure, Google, I'll still use your search engine (sometimes), but what's in it for me?"
MediaPost readers!
I'm one of the college brand ambassadors that is pushing this campaign.
If you do wind up signing up for it, help me out!
- visit www.campussearchperks.com,
- select University of Colorado Boulder
Thanks!!
Not too bad, but I still can't believe you guys don't have a search page without the background image. I've switch to using google again because I frequently use Remote Desktop and Live is painfully slow with a background image. I've seen other comments similar to this, <sarcasm> but I guess people in IT should be ignored. They'll only tell the people who they help on their computers to use Google and not Live, because that's what they use. </sarcasm>
I think this is a great idea. Thanks for the great stuff.
Very good idea, i want to get mouse using your program.
Please add more stuffs.
Any chance of a firefox plugin? Remember this is about getting people to use your search engine. Requiring a specific browser which only runs on Windows is probably not a good way of doing that.
Two comments:
1) Why aren't Xbox Marketplace points/Zune Marketplace points available? 1000 tickets for 1000 point would really motivate a lot of folks I know.
2) From a marketing perspective, I think this is a great tactic to get Live Search initial exposure. I think a lot of people that try Live Search will find that it's a reasonably good search engine for most things. And for the things it's not quite up to par with Google on, this "profit sharing" system will be enough incentive for many people to continue using it as their primary search engine anyway.
I think Peter Gluck's comment is interesting: Contests for searches is an idea that should be considered to maintain brand loyalty, but not at to the detriment of Live Search marketing. People don't know about Live Search relative to Google or other search engines and that's the first obstacle that I think Microsoft has to overcome.
re: Firefox
As much as I like Firefox, from a practicality perspective, I hope you folks don't waste any time doing the development work necessary to implement a secure search counter for Firefox - especially for an incentive program that is only going to be in existence for 3-6 months. I suspect that the target market for this program isn't the 8% of the world (i.e. the technogeeks) who think that what browser you use is a religion not a preference toward a tool, but rather the 81% of the world using IE. is more than a big enough target for a search engine with only 10% marketshare.
The Toolbar does not "stick" where I place it. I have moved the awards toobar next to the MSN tool bar, but everythim I start the browser the awards toolbar moves back to its own line.
