Microsoft is going to let marketers and advertisers dip their toes into the social stream. The tech giant is planning to launch a new social media product, dubbed “Looking Glass,” which will let marketers aggregate and monitor social media platforms for brands and companies. According to a report by Ad Age today, the product is still in “proof of concept” stage and will be privately distributed to testers in the coming month. Microsoft’s advertising blog also mentions the new product.
Looking Glass will aggregate feeds from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and other social media sites and will also be able connect with CRMs, databases, service centers and more. In terms of analysis, the product will track sentiment of content but it’s unclear what other data analysis and features the application will have. Looking Glass will be browser-based and powered by Microsoft’s Silverlight technology. And unsurprisingly, all data collected by Looking Glass will be integrated with Microsoft’s Sharepoint and Outlook products. In fact, the product’s functionality may be limited for a business that isn’t using Microsoft’s enterprise suite.
That tidbit isn’t too big of a surprise, considering other platforms, like Salesforce, offer social monitoring and engagement services that are attached to their software. But it seems like Microsoft is pretty late in the “stream monitoring” game. There are plenty of startups out there like Viralheat, PeopleBrowsr, Socialseek and more that offer freemium platforms that do the same thing as Looking Glass. Not to mention that Salesforce just launched an incredibly powerful version of its Service Cloud, with Twitter and Facebook features integrated within the platform.
The other piece of the puzzle is if Looking Glass will have real-time functionality. That’s definitely where the future of social monitoring is, so it would make sense that Microsoft would add this into the product. We’ve contacted Microsoft about this question; we’ll update the post with more info when we hear back.
UPDATE: Looking Glass will have real-time functionality says a spokesperson for Microsoft.
Photo Credit: Flickr/Pfly
This makes a lot of sense to me. It has the potential to be the new google as it should not be restricted to marketer, but to everyone.
This does makes sense but I feel that the real-time social stream space will quickly becoming overcrowded with everyone vying for relevance..
Maybe the social stream is really a feature and not a product in itself. Maybe Microsoft is doing the right thing by figuring out how to make the social stream a useful addition to its current offerings.
Maybe . ..
http://www.trad...spx?symbol=msft
IMHO, this is just another case of MS trying to compete with paper and “proofs of concept” with what others deliver: “Social Monitoring” has been around for quite a while; not only SalesForce.com but also social vendors like Jive have been delivering this (http://www.jive...rket-engagement).
Microsoft, heh:
1. Have to use MS products.
2. Closed
3. Frakkin’ expensive
4. It is MS
Nice post and very useful also.
Maybe it will cost more upfront, but companies will win in integration and lower Total Cost of Ownership due to the integration.
Real-time functionality is the key, that’s the direction which all social streams are heading in. Other companies may have superior products but it’s still MS; when you have that clout people will seek you out.
Real-time, custom aggregation and decent historical views will be key for me.
Whether this will compete with an aggregated view of the numerous apps which provide different analysis of the various streams, is hard to tell.
I find that the ‘conversation view’ of various streams is quite weak in current apps…it would be interesting to see this done well on one channel, but fantastically useful to trace this across various channels – hard to visualise but very powerful.
I think Microsoft’s move here is particularly relevant to the enterprise space where many large companies have Microsoft server-based systems. I posted more about Looking Glass here – http://bit.ly/m3MvK.
Overall, I think what’s going to happen around LookingGlass most closely parallels Salesforce.com’s efforts with their customer service – Twitter integration.
Awesome, can’t wait to get my hands on something like this. Could be a huge time saver for me!