If you have a brand to protect, a product or a service to sell, then you cannot afford to overlook the wealth of information that is now available to you via social media. You need to be able to tap into the social conversation so you can make the right moves for your business. Lots of people would have you think that social is an end in and of itself, but we think differently. We think social capabilities need to be a natural part of the tools you use every day. We think you can get more done if social insights surface within your account records, if you can communicate with your social network within the context of an opportunity, if you can understand the influence of someone calling into your customer care department before you prioritize their call.
That’s why, fast on the heels of our MarketingPilot announcement, I am happy to share the news with you about another acquisition—this time in the social listening and analytics space. When Microsoft considers an acquisition, we look for leading edge technology companies with innovative IP that aligns with our technology and can scale for the enterprise; this is what we were fortunate enough to find with Netbreeze. A dynamic Swiss company started by some incredibly talented analytics scientists that we enthusiastically welcome to the Microsoft family.
We all know that social media has changed consumer behavior by giving people a very powerful voice that they are not afraid to use. Our customers realize they need to listen to what is happening across social media and news channels so they can monitor sentiment and analyze trends in order to take effective action to drive sales, optimize their communications and identify their loyal advocates.
Netbreeze technology is unique in the way it combines modern methods from Natural Language Processing (NLP), data mining and semantic text analysis to support 28 different writing systems including German, English, French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Japanese, Traditional Chinese or Mandarin. This is a huge benefit over competing solutions that translate to a common language then analyze sentiment from there. Additionally, they offer their customers the ability to monitor a wide array of social channels including Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, as well as 6,000 online news websites, 18 million blogs and 500,000 message boards.
The way we will make this technology available makes this acquisition even more compelling. We are going to provide access to this rich data across your marketing, sales and service teams so that each and every person using your CRM system can have this consumer insight at their fingertips. Delivering these capabilities is a critical part of our social strategy.
Now with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, you have the tools to know what people are saying and the insights to do something meaningful about it.
Bob Stutz