Social Monitoring: Facebook + Bing + Looking Glass = ??
Author: Katie
Ok, maybe I just read the blog posts in my RSS in the wrong order but I think there might be something to this.
First, I read about Microsoft’s new program, “Looking Glass” that’s a social media monitoring tool currently in closed beta. I’ve heard about this before, but today Jay Baer wrote an interesting article on how it will affect the marketplace of social monitoring tools. Cool.
Second, I read on Inside Facebook about Facebook making a deal with Microsoft’s Bing on indexing public status updates. [If you go the security settings on your account, you can select the "everyone" option. Right now - if you do that - your status updates show up on Facebook search. Now's the time to double check your settings.] Apparently Facebook is also looking into providing this information to Google – but the deal on the table today is with Bing.
In the past, Facebook updates have been off-limits to us social monitors. The only way to look for them was to search on Facebook and even then you mainly just saw what you’re own friends and networks were saying (ineffective) so most Facebook “monitoring” really occurs on the brands own pages and groups. In recent months, Radian6 (and I’m assuming a few other tools, I just happen to prefer R6) has introduced functionality to pull in mentions that occur on discussion boards located in public groups – cool but still pretty limiting.
After Facebook added the search function on its own site where you could search “Posts by Everyone” I started thinking it was only a matter of time before these public updates were accessible by monitoring tools. So in my mind, this deal with Bing is related to Microsoft’s development of Looking Glass. Getting in on the ground floor of publically indexing Facebook updates would make it easy for them to integrate those results into Looking Glass. That would give them an advantage out of the gate. I’m sure it wouldn’t last long, other tools would have to pick up the capability pretty quickly – and as first movers they’re already ingrained in a lot of corporations and agencies, but…could shake things up a bit.
Posted via email from Katie Van Domelen’s Posterous
UPDATE: Google’s adding Twitter to it’s search database (Mashable)- Bing no longer has the upper hand there. However…still no solid news on Facebook and Google so Bing may still be a front runner on that side.
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i am a user of Microsofts BING search engine and it is as good as google for static webpage search. for searching blogs, i think google gives more relevant search results compared bing.