Today is officially the last day of Advertising Week. Unfortunately I was only able to make it to the first three days.  I was just overwhelmed by the enormous amount of information and just plain craziness involved in attending a multiple day conference.

I’m glad that I choose to attend though. I might not try to attend as many events next time though!

The last seminar I attended was on Wednesday. Social Networking 2.0: Brands Get in the Game presented by Robin Domeniconi, Vice President-US Advertising Sales, Publishing and Marketing, Microsoft discussed Microsoft’s social branding strategies, how it is working with agencies to harness social media and also showcased a project code named “Looking Glass”. “Looking Glass” is a social-media aggregator and monitoring tool Microsoft hopes will allow marketers to better monitor what is going on across media channels.

Advertising Age features a story about “Looking Glass” titled Microsoft Wants to Help Marketers Manage Messy Social Media. Based on the comments about the article quite a few people see the benefit of this tool but are not happy that Microsoft is pushing another one of it’s products to do it. “Looking Glass” is built on top of SharePoint, so that it can utilize the features of that platform i.e emailing items within the system. However, SharePoint is a product that has several problems in the past. How smart is it for Microsoft to build this tool with that technology?

It’s definitely a much needed tool as more and more business is done using social media. Marketing is truly two way these days and customers are no longer interested in having media pushed at them without being able to respond. A company that can listen and ACT is sure to be in a better position than a company that just ignores social media in hopes that it is just a fad.

All in all Advertising Week was a great opportunity to learn and experience new technologies.