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Microsoft Tests Social Media Monitoring Product By Christopher Heine, ClickZ, Sep 24, 2009 Microsoft has developed a social media analytics tool that's designed, among other things, to improve a marketing organization's ability to adjust to social media phenomena on the fly. Called "Looking Glass," the product is still in prototype and will only be available to a few companies in the near term. It sends e-mail alerts when social media activity picks up considerably. The sentiment (i.e., negative or positive) of that chatter and the influence level of the content creator are reported in the alert. Digital flow charts show what days of the week generate the most activity on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, and other social media sites. But interweaving social media data with reporting from other campaign channels may turn out be Microsoft's most significant contribution to the already mature field of social media analytics. Feeds from social media sites can be connected to other business elements like customer databases, CRM centers and sales data within an organization. The data integrate via Microsoft's enterprise platforms like Outlook and Sharepoint. A handful or so companies will begin testing Looking Glass in the coming weeks.

The vast majority of these views are served by Youtube, which ranked No. 5 in the top 10 web brands for April 2009 (behind Google, Yahoo, MSN/Windows Live and Microsoft).

Next, you’ll want to see which pages of your site are bringing keyword traffic and whether they are the specific ones for which you optimized. To view this, click on the “content overview” section and then on the right hand side of the page, under “landing page optimization” click on “entrance keywords.”  This allows you to view specific stats for each page of your site. The first screen is the entrance keywords for the page that receives the most pageviews (typically your home page), but you can click to other pages via the drop down box that says “content.” If you don’t immediately see a page for which you are interested in viewing entrance keywords, you can type a word that you know is in the URL of that page in the search box that’s contained in the content dropdown. So if you’re looking for a page that has a file name of /green-widgets.php you can type just “green” or “widgets” into the search box and you’ll see all pages that have that word in the file name. Now you should be able to see all the entrance keywords for that page. Are they ones (or variations of) those for which you optimized?  If so, then your SEO is taking hold! If not, you’ll want to determine why. Perhaps it’s just too soon after your SEO work was completed. Perhaps they’re highly competitive phrases which will need more anchor text links pointing in.

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