During a press briefing on Microsoft Dynamics 2013, the company showed off a service called Netbreeze that they recently acquired. The analytics service is not currently available as they closed the doors after the acquisition. Microsoft are now working on integrating the service into Dynamics CRM, but this will occur in Q1 2014.
The service allows businesses to monitor the web, including social to watch for terms that relate to their business, products or services. Netbreeze will support Facebook and Twitter, RSS as well as adding support for Pinterest and Instagram in the future.
Netbreeze looks at content and detects sentiments, essentially looking deeper than a post containing a keyword, but looking at the phrasing of the post to interpret whether the post is positive, negative or neutral.
Something Netbreeze does that other competitors doesn’t, is to run its sentiments algorithm in native languages (English, Spanish, German, French). This is important as translating foreign languages to English can introduce translation issues, then the sentiment could be considerable off.
Adding RSS feeds is great to watch which blogs are writing about your business, but I asked the question about comments. I asked if Disqus would be considered. Microsoft said they will continue to work with large platforms like Forums, WordPress and Disqus.
Microsoft Research are currently working on a translation system for ‘young people speak’, which would take their short codes and translate them into natural language so it can then be interpreted by the system.
Businesses can monitor influential people in their industry and can drill down to see the detail of specific posts. The relevant keywords in the post are highlighted and direct action buttons are available. This allows the brand manager to reply directly, retweet and when the CRM integration is complete, will add options to add the post to CRM for follow up action. Whatever you think of Klout, it is an option in Netbreeze, with user’s Klout score presented beside their posts.
All of this data is presented in seriously clean and nice UI with radial percentage breakdowns of information like traffic sources. The important thing to remember is that pretty UI doesn’t count for anything unless you can take action on the data.
One interest application of the analytics is to watch for posts that could indicate a potential issue with the supply chain. So while a collection of tweets about a traffic accident may have no direct impact on your business, it may have indirect impacts like the distribution of goods to customers in appropriate timelines. If you can spot this early, trucks may be able to re-route or automated customer notifications could be sent to mitigate the issue.
Initially Netbreeze will be offered as part of Office 365, with a vision to offer it as a separate subscription in Q1 2014.
In terms of the alert system available in Netbreeze, the first release will start with essentially a blank canvas, but future releases will have pre-built IFTTT recipe style templates. Perfect for the #ShutUpAndTakeMyMoney hashtag that businesses could quickly add to their alerts for product and services.
