Reputation Armor

Microsoft yesterday unveiled a monitoring tool that’s designed, among other things, to improve a marketing organization’s ability to adjust to social media phenomena on the fly.

Called “Looking Glass,” the product is still in prototype and will only be available to a few companies in the near term. It sends e-mail alerts when social media activity picks up considerably. The sentiment (i.e., negative or positive) of that chatter and the influence level of the content creator are reported in the alert. Digital flow charts show what days of the week generate the most activity on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, and other social media sites.

But interweaving social media data with reporting from other campaign channels may turn out be Microsoft’s most significant contribution to the already mature field of social media analytics. Feeds from social media sites can be connected to other business elements like customer databases, CRM centers and sales data within an organization. The data integrate via Microsoft’s enterprise platforms like Outlook and Sharepoint.

A handful or so companies will begin testing Looking Glass in the coming weeks. According to a spokesperson, the company hopes to release it to the broader marketing public sometime next year.

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