The Semantic Revolution

Microsoft unveiled a proof-of-concept prototype “LookingGlass” this week at Advertising Week 2009.

According to Jamey Tisdale and and Marc Mercuri from Microsoft, “LookingGlass,” will let companies listen to, participate in, and analyze social media. It harnesses the Microsoft platform to demonstrate how businesses can quickly and efficiently put social media to use as they create advertising. It’s a prototype of a social media business platform,  “What we’re trying to do is to make social media actionable for businesses.”

The first step in making social media data useable is listening to the conversation. LookingGlass, which is built on a number of Microsoft technologies, lets users track customer sentiment across an array of social media sites. For example, the Zune HD marketing team could use LookingGlass to see what users are saying about the product in real time on Twitter, Flickr, or YouTube. Using technology from Microsoft Research, LookingGlass automatically rates each posting as positive or negative, so the Zune HD team could rank comments according to sentiment and see how customers are responding to the product and the campaign to sell it.

Under the Zune example, the team could use LookingGlass to post a quick response on Twitter or Facebook. With all that information, businesses will be able to participate in conversations taking place on the social Web or start new ones. At a glance, they’ll be able to see a spike in activity and to pinpoint how their campaigns are being received. marc enthused that that’s what gives LookingGlass its power “You can not only identify whether your message is on target or not, you can discover memes or customer segments that you’re presently unaware of.”

LookingGlass will be accessed via a web browser to allow for compatibility with both PCs and Macs.

With LookingGlass, businesses can overlay advertising, sales, support, and other key business information onto their Web sites. Built using Microsoft SQL Server 2008, LookingGlass readily integrates with other internal data. Marketers can then look at how internal data compares with, say, user sentiment of a product on Twitter or other social networking sites. They can then take targeted actions and enhance their investment of participating in social media.

This allows businesses to analyze their advertising investments in new ways. The emphasis is that LookingGlass is its own platform, which plays to Microsoft’s strength. “Microsoft is uniquely qualified to be able to connect business information with social media information in a way that makes it actionable,” said Jamey. Partners will be also able to build on top of the Microsoft platform to add their own insights and information for their clients.

“If we at Microsoft can change the discussion from banner ads to how do you provide a rich, relevant experience on the Web, we can start having a better business conversation. With LookingGlass, and some of the other proof-of-concepts we’re working on, we’re taking a big step toward changing that conversation.”

Quoted heavily from Microsoft Advertising Blog

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