Microsoft Social Listening – treasure or gimmick?

Now that "tweeting", "Facebooking" and "whatsapping" have become the normal behaviour, what are the implications for business? Go to any news site and chances are you'll see a story that some large company or other is apparently getting lots of flack via social media. How do you make sure it's not you one day?

Well the first thing is to know what is being posted relating to your brand or the products and services you provide. Unless you've got the time and inclination to spend 24 hours a day checking that a twitter storm hasn't blown up that relates to you then, Microsoft’s social listening will help.

This works by you telling social listening the names or terms you want to know about. It then monitors everything from tweets to Facebook posts and determines if the sentiment is positive or negative. When either way reaches a trigger point you've set, it alters you so that you can take address the situation. As so often in life an early apology or corrective action can take the sting out of a situation and make you look great guys rather than cowboys.

Social Listening works via a subscription that covers so many events i.e. a tweet or post listing one of the search terms you’ve defined. Once you have that subscription you can link the results up to Dynamics CRM or Dynamics NAV, both of which will pull through the latest results for the record you are looking at.

This introduces the possibility of listening not just for your own brands and products but your customers and competitors as well. That means from within NAV for instance you could see sentiment related to a particular customer and so deduce if they are more of less likely to buy from you going forward.