One of the things that often gets neglected in discussions about social media is the need to discover and make sense of the conversations that people have about topics and brands.  The normal approach for this is to watch the usual suspects of newspapers, TV, bloggers and key influencers.You  look at and listen to the people you already know and respect, then ignore the rest. This approach worked when influence was based largely upon the ability to afford to own a printing press or a broadcast transmitter, but social media and other new platforms allow the thoughts of regular people to be posted and shared with great rapidity. This means that important (and potentially influential) conversations are being ignored. What’s needed are tools that allow us to move from a model of selective monitoring to a new model that allows us to effectively sample the conversational firehose, and make that information usable for deep analysis and visualization.

A number of companies have made social media monitoring tools that have a wide range of functionality and costs. I some cases some systems that cost hundreds or thousands of dollars per month offer little more functionality that what can be cobbled together with free and low cost tools. The best of them are able discover topic related posts and comments in close to real-time from blogs, microblogs and the mainstream print media. Some also incorporate engagement workflow tools that help to track conversations and assign team members to determine how best to deal with those conversations.

Most of the companies creating these systems are small, scrappy companies (although some are funded by very large interests). So I thought it was very interesting that Microsoft Research was looking in to this space as well. They’ve created a system called LookingGlass that is able to discover pertinent conversations, present them in dashboard form and incorporates CRM features based upon the Sharepoint platform. It looks like a potentially very robust tool that could do a lot to establish a standard for social media monitoring. Of course, monitoring is just part of the solution, but this type of data is essential to analyze and determine the impact of social media engagement. Here's a video introduction to LookingGlass.