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.

Author: James Crowter

I’m passionate about how businesses can improve their efficiency by getting process optimal more of the time. For the last twenty five years I’ve worked to help organisations of all sizes and types implement the ERP & CRM software that typically they decide they need when things are going wrong. I’ve seen that work unbelievably well and enabled those organisations to rapidly grow but I’ve also had some hard projects over that time where it’s felt more like warfare at times. Since 1996 (and version 1.01) I’ve been working with a small Danish product called Navision that’s now become Microsoft’s Dynamics NAV and I’ve also been using and consulting around Microsoft CRM since 2005. As managing Director of one of the longest established first Navision and now Microsoft Dynamics partners I’ve been involved in the complete history including numerous product councils and system design reviews. It’s my privilege to know many of the key Microsoft executives and product designers and have insight into both where the products are now and their future direction. So colleagues & clients have asked me to start this blog to share some of the insight that both this knowledge (obviously where not restricted by NDA’s or client confidentiality) and experience can help. Specifically I want to concentrate not on the specifics of how (there are some great blogs already for that) but why. If any user helps their business make better decisions or consultant can give better advice then that will be objective achieved. I founded Technology Management in 1992 and have led from the front ever since. Helping clients use technology to grow their business is my passion through explaining technology in terms that everyone can understand. My interest in computing began at the age of eight, long before my school had the equipment to cope. Throughout school and university I developed software commercially. I hold many IT certifications, such as Microsoft Dynamics NAV (for over 17 years), Microsoft Dynamics CRM (for over 10 years), as well as Microsoft Windows Server, Exchange and SQL. In October 2015, I was awarded the title of Most Valuable Professional (MVP), a title given to a select few individuals (31 currently) across the world specifically for Dynamics NAV. After years of working with a range of distribution and manufacturing software for hundreds of organisations, I focus on understanding the business requirements of an organisation, what it will take to deliver the systems required to maximise their potential. Follow me online via my other social channels: - Twitter: @jamescrowter - LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jamescrowter Or email me directly at james[.]crowter[@]tecman.co.uk.

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