Report from The GRAMMYs: More #Doing With Bing During GRAMMY Week

Arjan blogging backstage at The GRAMMYs

Bing recently launched a new advertising campaign that emphasizes that the search engine can help you with more and better "doing." It’s not about just digging for information; it’s about finding relevant and accurate bits fast that can help you with all of life’s "doing."

During The GRAMMYs, “doing” things fast is extremely important to me. I’m covering, researching, blogging, tweeting and meeting artists throughout GRAMMY Week and it’s all happening in real-time, on the fly and on the spot.

Covering The GRAMMYs is not only just about being backstage at a big television show and mingle with the stars. During GRAMMY Week, the days leading up to The GRAMMY Awards telecast, my schedule is packed with other GRAMMY-related events and parties that I’m asked to blog and tweet about.

With a packed calendar, little sleep and all the excitement about The GRAMMY, it is very important for me to make sure I have the tools in place to be able to seamlessly cover all the GRAMMY action. There’s nothing more devastating than to loose battery power, have poor wireless connections or not being able to find the information you need to blog when you’re working in real-time. When you have a moment with Katy Perry and you hear 2 minutes in advance that that is about to happen there is no time for second chances. You have to act fast.

As a blogger, part of my routine is to carefully research potential interviewees. I take notes about their past projects, career highlights, prior GRAMMY accomplishments and I catch up on what current projects they are working on. I like to be fully prepared and artists appreciate that. The result is always that you have a better conversation with more noteworthy information that an artist is willing to share.

During GRAMMY Week, I have solely relied on Bing as my main research partner. I know that you have several choices when it comes to searching the web, but for me Bing stands out in delivering the best and most relevant search results fast. And since time is critical for me, speed and accuracy is vital.

If I’m on the Red Carpet I cannot waste my time browsing through pages of results to make sure I find something I can use when I see that The Band Perry is three steps away from me. I think you get the picture of why speed matters when you're blogging in real-time.

Try for example searching for "Adele" on Bing. You’re instantly linked to a topic page that delivers all the latest news, her main web site, past videos and other information that is relevant. I can instantly dig deeper to find images, videos and news related to Adele.

Bing also integrates with Facebook that makes searching a lot easier as well. I can see in my search results how many friends have “liked” a link so it makes it more relevant for me to check out that information.

The image search in Bing is that best I’ve ever seen. On this blog, I use an image for every new blog I post. Sometimes it can take a little while to find an image that I like and that I feel represents the artist well. Bing enables me to find images much faster, because it sorts by size, it shows you were the image is already used and it has a cool slideshow feature to quickly scroll through image results from left to right.

Another neat feature is Bing Maps. While planning my way around Los Angeles attending GRAMMY events, I make sure to map everything prior to driving as I want to make absolutely sure that I’m going to the right location. I hate being late and with L.A. traffic I need to know exactly where I’m going. Not only is it really fast to get directions using Bing, but the site also provides a “Bird’s Eye View” and “Aerial View” of the location so I can scope it out prior to getting there. I know others map, but I feel Bing helps get me there faster.

The fast searches for information, images and maps is not available on the web, you can also download a Bing app for your mobile phone to get all of those features right at your fingertips. Super easy!

Lastly, Bing’s daily picture on bing.com just brightens your day. It’s a great way to start a search and get more of that “doing” done faster.

(Promotional message sponsored by Bing that is enthusiastically endorsed by ArjanWrites.com)