On Internet Business

Microsoft tackles analysing social media

Posted by Michael under Search, Social Media

Measuring the impact and effect of social media campaigns has become a key issue for business. Many tools that measure social media (they are called analytics) are blunt instruments – they create charts but have no real-time flow and have to be accessed, they don’t alert the company to new emergence of social buzz.

Microsoft’s new tool is named Looking Glass and it’s still a prototype with a few chosen companies being involved in a test and response phase at present.

What makes Looking Glass interesting? Two things – the first is that it sends e-mail alerts if social media activity picks up or changes direction – so it reveals negative or positive feedback in social media commentary within the alert. The other key feature is the reporting reveals which days of the week generate the highest activity on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, and other social media sites. A Microsoft spokesman said, “… if you are not using it as a listening tool, then you are really not getting the complete benefit of a Twitter or a Facebook because a part of [your] job is to watch the conversations on the wall.”

Looking Glass is not the only kid on the block though – new systems with similar approaches have been launched by Squidoo which offers a way to let brands filter their online reputation for a fee. And Trackr has launched an online Authority List that tracks and identifies thought leaders the online communities. As it says on its website: Discussions on brands, products and trends are no longer controlled by marketers. Influential bloggers, reviewers, gamers, and other digital creators lead these conversations and shape opinions.

So why does Looking Glass stand out? The main reason is that it blends social media data with reporting from other campaign channels such customer databases, call- and service- centres and sales data so that an organisation has a seamless sense of the ‘buzz’ and a clear picture of where that buzz originates. And it allows a company to keep track of who is saying what about it, through which channels. Not all businesses are convinced of the need to monitor social media, partly because they can’t see how to integrate monitoring with PR or other promotional activity, if Looking Glass can offer the ability to link sales data, commentary and management of brand, for example, it may make the breakthrough into the mainstream that the other systems haven’t.

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