Recently Microsoft unveiled its new Looking Glass – a proof-of-concept” social media monitoring and management solution. This is essentially a ‘listening post’ designed to monitor and analyze social media transactions.
Back in the 70′ s we used to pay big bucks to media-watch services.
As the internet age unfolded, surfers for information on companies and products quickly discovered they could forage through various channels, bookmark what they found and then try to make sense of it all.
Then aggregators such as Kosmix came along, advances in the technology which enabled surfers to rapidly assemble a webpage that included all the various posts referring to a particular business or individual. This software scours the internet and harvests references, blogs, forums, video, photos etc into one convenient format, giving the viewer an instant corporate profile so to speak.
Other programs exist to compliment these aggregating services, but the technology needed development and disparate data remained in separate silos.
Advances in other discipline are now finding their way into the new market of Social Media transactions.
In the stock trading world back in the late 80’s and early 90’s, we charted by hand, day by day and then drew trendlines and indicators. When trading software arrived, like Super Charts, it was a real blessing.
Later however, as the technology grew more sophisticated, we got sentiment indicators and ‘market carpets’ along with a variety of exotic technical analytics.
A market carpet is a visual mosaic of sectors and their stocks. Each square represents a stock and is color coded according to its performance over a period of time. As you hover your cursor over the square, links to the stock pop up. There is a simple chart on the right with chicklets and links which drill down into more advanced analytics.
Market Carpet for TSE – TD Bank in the Financial Sector
Thanks to Looking Glass, these advances are now being applied to the social media marketing phenomena. This ‘listening post’ operates using the same principles that underlie technical analysis in the investment world.
For each company that is listed in the “exchange”, the program will return all the information it finds and aggregate it in one place. For example, in the image below, all the twitter, facebook, and blog mentions are represented as a bar graph.
The large reddish bar above indicates there was a spike of activity on Twitter This is an indicator and it triggers an alert so the appropriate action can be taken by the company’s marketing department. Collaboration tools within the corporation and its verticles make sharing of this information easy and result in quick decisions and actions.
Here is Stephen Kim of Microsoft explaining how this works.
The many advances been made in other disciplines are now filtering over into the new social media landscape. As in the technical analysts of stocks and commodities, there will be more sophisticated ways of measuring and responding to social transaction, patterns of behavior that are relatively stable in human nature.
