“They’re late, they’re late, but it’s for a very important date!”
Like Alice’s March Hare in Wonderland, Microsoft is commmitted to providing marketers and advertisers with a trip “through the looking glass” into the distributed world of social media.
The Microserfs are planning to launch a new social media product, dubbed “Looking Glass,” which will aggregate and monitor social media platforms for brands and companies. According to a report by Ad Age, 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.
The “Best 0f” Social Media:” 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. This type of aggregation is what more people had hoped for from Google during the recent introduction of the SideWikli service which sets up Google as an independent social media comments board instead of an impartial aggregator.
The Microsoft social analytics 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.
Microsoft is not alone at this particular tea paty. Viralheat, PeopleBrowsr, Socialseek and other freemium platforms do the same thing as Looking Glass. Salesforce.com had also launched an incredibly powerful version of its Service Cloud, with Twitter and Facebook features integrated within the platform. [24X7]
Get more info in the Seattle24x7 blog
