When you step into a race much later when your competitor has already made considerable benchmarks, you need to be highly innovative and an excellent strategist to catch people’s eyeballs. And Bing is doing precisely that.

Considering the mass hysteria created by Farmville, a web based game on Facebook, Microsoft thought it wise to promote Bing on Farmville by luring its users free virtual ‘cash’, supposedly quite a ‘valuable’ asset in the game. This resulted in 80 million users to see the big ‘Bing’ logo on their virtual farms.

The banner read ‘Become a fan of Bing now and get FREE Farm Cash’.

The idea was not only unique, it proved to be a massive hit. The number of fans on Bing’s Facebook page rose from a few lacs to millions and counting. Yes, the thing has gone viral. So, if you are running out of Farmville cash (or whatever) you know what you need to do, right?

PS: I hate Farmville. Never played it. Never will. Period.