Social media seems to be the talk of conference this year. Everyone knows it's important and everyone is not quite sure how it should be integrated into the marketing mix in the best way. Following this morning's announcement of LookingGlass, Robin Domeniconi of Microsoft Advertising interviewed Erin Matts, Chief Digital Officer at OMD, and Marty Collins, Group Marketing Manager of Windows, Microsoft, on what makes social media effective and efficient. Both Erin and Marty shared great insights from an agency and an advertiser perspective:

Erin Matts, Chief Digital Officer at OMD

- In order to pull off social media well, a very unique skill set is required from all areas - crisis management from PR, copy writing from creative, traffic from paid search, and analytics and measurement.

- An agency can stay on top of social media by subscribing to services that provide syndicated data and having people who are digital natives, who grew up and know social media space.

- To be successful, an agency needs to be flexible and to be able to bring the right set of expertise for social media.

Marty Collins, Group Marketing Manager, Windows, Microsoft

- We were strategic about starting on the right social media channels at the right time, but now we are in a continuous monitoring and participation mode.

- We are able to communicate 24 hrs a day which no longer aligns to a traditional PR cycle.

- We are partnering with other marketing disciplines, like advertising, PR and product marketing, to make sure our social media work is aligned and we can respond quickly. For instance, when we posted Kylie ad to YouTube, we knew immediately it was successful and decided to continue using her in other ad spots (which was not the plan before).

But the best part of this session was seeing the demo of the tool code-named "LookingGlass". It brings together monitoring and collaboration functionality not just for marketers or advertisers, but also for sales, customer service, engineering and other groups within a company. You can monitor social media activity for multiple brands real-time at an aggregate level or drill down to a specific source of information (like a tweet or a photo where your brand is mentioned). You can then take an action, for instance, assign a task for your PR manager to follow up on a negative tweet or share the trending data with your product group. Powered by Microsoft's Sharepoint technology and additional artificial intelligence, LookingGlass allows you to bring internal and external data sets that can be overlaid on top of social media data. For example, data from your call center or CRM or from a 3^rd party research firm. The tool is still a proof of concept, but we hope with your feedback we can shape it to be exactly what you want - and hopefully bring to market quickly.

Rimma

P.S. Full replay of this session will be coming to our AdWeek site later on tonight. Stay tuned!

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