Microsoft Gets Into Social Media Monitoring Business

Microsoft will unveil Looking Glass today, its first offering in the crowded social media monitoring space. Looking Glass is not yet available to the public and Microsoft will begin testing it next month. Advertising Age‘s Abbey Klaassen explains how it will work:

A marketing manager can get an e-mail alert when there’s a sudden surge of chatter about his or her brand on Twitter or Facebook, along with the sentiment of that chatter and the influence level of those blogging. That information can then be connected to a customer-relationship-management system to decide whether customer service or PR should respond. Or a cable operator’s customer service rep could monitor Twitter for outage reports and send off a repair request straight from the tool. And Looking Glass will hook up to existing customer databases, so a pharmaceutical brand manager would be able to figure out if a person throwing a hissy fit on his blog is an influential doctor or current customer.

In Forrester Research’s Q1 2009 report on “Listening Platforms,” Nielsen’s Buzz Metrics ranked highest.

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