Social Media Monitoring

 Social media is becoming more and more convoluted as time goes on and, unfortunately, especially to large companies who are often at the mercy of the social media, this does not always mean it's becoming more informative. Microsoft is attempting to tackle this issue with Looking Glass, a social-media monitoring tool. Although still its "proof of concept" phase, which means it is not yet marketable and only available to a small group of people for testing purposes, Microsoft feels it will let marketers see the software giant in a different way. They want to present themselves as a company that can help solve business issues, and they are using attempting to use social media to do it.

Looking Glass is designed to use the most popular social networking platforms, like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, to obtain a variety of information and insert it into the company's enterprise software, like Sharepoint and Outlook.

The idea is that all of the social-media data that is available on the web can become something that a company or marketer can actually use. For example, an email would be sent to the client when there is a sudden increase in chatter about their company. The email would include such details as the influence level of those blogging as well as their sentiment toward the company. It could then be decided who, if anyone within the company, should respond. The tool could be customized for the individual companies to allow such things as repair tickets being issued and public relations being contacted without having to use multiple software applications. Looking Glass would also have the capability to connect to customer databases in order to identify bloggers so that the company could take appropriate action.

One crucial use for such software would be the ability to quickly identify a possible PR disaster before it actually happens, as is evidenced by a situation that the Windows 7 team encountered during the beginning of beta testing. A load-balancing plan, designed to control the number of simultaneous downloads to ensure system stability, was bypassed by a tech blogger causing the operating system to crash. From within the Looking Glass tool, the Microsoft team was able to detect that the issue was being blogged about, notify the would-be angry beta testers of an impending fix, and issue a bug report internally.

"There are so many stories that could have happened [during the beta launch]," said Marty Taylor Collins, head of Microsoft's social-media marketing for the Windows 7 team. "And this was best story that never did."

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