Microsoft Announces Looking Glass For Social Media Monitoring

To help brands better manage the flow of conversation in social media, Microsoft is trying out a new program called Looking Glass.

Starting next month, the pilot program will help brands better integrate their customer-relationship-manangement efforts.

The thinking is that by aggregating the ongoing conversation feed for a given brand on social networks like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, companies will be better positioned to respond.

That’s the thinking at least. There’s a lot of data out there and Microsoft wants to help brands separate what’s actionable vs. what’s not.

The program is also intended to dovetail with their current enterprise solutions such as Sharepoint and Outlook to help CRM efforts.

Could it be a hit? Possibly. Metrics for monitoring social networks vary greatly, both in terms of cost and performance.

They can range from an all-in-one monitoring service like Radian6 to any number of free apps that only look at one aspect of social media.

While earlier this month Adobe announced plans to incorporate social media monitoring into some of its software releases for developers, Microsoft is the first major software maker to directly address social media this way.

Source: Marketing Vox