Chapter 14. Microsoft Dynamics Social Engagement
Previously known as Social Listening, Microsoft Dynamics Social Engagement brings together Microsoft Dynamics CRM and social channels (Facebook, Twitter, and so on) in a combined package.
Microsoft Dynamics Social Engagement helps your company monitor various social media channels to find what users and customers are saying and feeling about your products and services. You can use Dynamics Social Engagement to analyze these channels to quickly see if users are happy or unhappy with the services and products provided by your company.
Note
Microsoft Dynamics Social Engagement is part of Office 365 and requires an Office 365 subscription for it specifically in addition to Dynamics CRM.
Tip
For a free 30-minute trial of Social Engagement, visit https://listening-trial.microsoft.com/trial-bridge/. Note that this is not a fully functional trial version, but it has enough of the features that it’s worth trying out.
Using Microsoft Dynamics Social Engagement
The Dynamics Social Engagement interface is similar in look and feel to Dynamics CRM. However, it is a completely separate application and uses a separate database. Figure 14.1 shows the user interface for Dynamics Social Engagement.
The Dynamics Social Engagement navigation bar is divided into the following main areas (see Figure 14.2):
Search Setup
Analytics
Social Center
Activity Maps
Message Center
Settings
Help
Pricing
Social Engagement, which is licensed through Office 365, is available as the following types of subscriptions:
Social Engagement Enterprise at $125 per user per month
Social Engagement Professional at $75 per user per month
The pricing used is current at the time of publication but may be subject to change. Check here for the most current pricing: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics/crm-social-purchase.aspx
The primary difference between the two options is the number of posts per month: Professional has 10,000 per month, versus Enterprise with 20,000. However, both versions have step-up options that allow you to purchase additional posts if necessary. In addition, the Enterprise version includes the Social Engagement option and also includes Parature and Microsoft Dynamics Marketing. If you’re just looking for Social Engagement, the Professional license may be sufficient.
For more information on Parature, SEE CHAPTER 12, “Parature.” For more information about Microsoft Dynamics Marketing, SEE CHAPTER 9, “Microsoft Dynamics Marketing.”
Note
There are a variety of licensing options and limitations with regard to Social Engagement, including a minimum number of CRM Professional users. For current details, see www.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics/crm-social-purchase.aspx.
The following sections discuss how to set up, configured, customize, and use Dynamics Social Engagement.
Configuration
When you access Social Engagement for the first time, you see an empty dashboard with a few recommendations for initial setup, as shown in Figure 14.3.
As discussed in the following sections, you need to complete three activities:
Set solution defaults.
Add users and assign roles.
Create search topics to gather data.
Setting Solution Defaults
To set solution defaults you need to go to Settings, where you see the Personal Settings by default. Select Personal Settings > Global Settings (see Figure 14.4).
Note
Depending on your screen size and resolution, you may initially be able to see the whole Settings menu and not need to first select Personal Settings.
Under Global Settings you can configure the following:
Default Preferences
Search Languages
Search Setup Defaults
Labels
Location Groups
Privacy
Default Preferences
When you are in the Global Settings area, click Default Preferences, and on this page you can change the name, default language, time, and number formats, as shown in Figure 14.5.
You can set more than a dozen screen languages. At publication time, Social Engagement was available in 15 languages:
Danish
Dutch
English
Finish
French
German
Italian
Norwegian
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish
On the Default Preferences page, you can set the following time frame options:
Today
Last Week
Last Month
Search Languages
On the Search Languages page you can select the languages you want the Social Engagement solution to look for.
At publication time, there were 20 search languages available:
Arabic
Chinese
Danish
Dutch
English
Finish
French
German
Greek
Hebrew
Italian
Japanese
Norwegian
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Swedish
Thai
Turkish
Note
Unselecting a language here removes any search rule associated with that language. As a result, to ensure accurate results, you should check as many options as you think might contain your listening keywords.
Search Setup Defaults
On the Search Setup Defaults page you can select the sources and languages you want the new searches to use, as shown in Figure 14.6.
These are the different sources you can select:
Blogs
Forums
Facebook
News
Twitter
Videos
Custom sources
Note
The News source option is limited to English, French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese.
Sentiment
On the Sentiment page you can select whether you want to use adaptive learning. Adaptive learning helps the system learn based on the user’s selection and is a valuable tool in sentiment analysis. You can reset it by clicking the Reset button, which lets the adaptive learning module start learning again from scratch.
Labels
You can use the Labels page to classify posts using different colors. The list of colors is limited to 10:
Blue
Cyan
Green
Lime
Magenta
Orange
Purple
Red
Teal
Yellow
Tip
You can reuse the colors on more than one label.
Location Groups
The Location Groups page helps you organize data in different locations. The system is predefined to use continents as the main location groups, which obviously contain countries inside of them. However, you can edit and configure your own locations for more discreet searching.
By default, the system comes with eight location groups:
Africa
Antarctica
Asia
Australia/Pacific
Europe
Middle East
North America/Central
South America
Note
While you can edit and create your own location groups, you cannot add new countries other than the predefined locations listed.
Privacy
The Privacy page lets you configure a privacy link to show to the users to let them know the Social Engagement solution needs to share some private data with the third-party services it connects to.
Adding Users and Assigning Roles
To add a user to Dynamics Social Engagement, you must first create the user in the Office 365 portal and assign a Social Engagement license to that user. After that, you can go to the Social Engagement web interface and navigate to Settings > User Management. There you select the user and assign a role from the right panel, as shown in Figure 14.7.
There are two different type of roles:
Configuration roles
Interaction roles
The configuration roles be any of the following:
Analyst
Power Analyst
Administrator
The interaction roles be any of the following:
Manager
Responder
Reader
Table 14.1 shows the effects of the different configuration roles on the Social Engagement system.
Table 14.2 shows the effects of the different interaction roles in the system.
Creating Search Topics to Gather Data
You can set up searches to start listening to social media conversations about topics and keywords that are interesting or topical for your business.
The first thing you need to do is to go to the Search Setup option in the navigation bar. Then click in the + icon in the Search Topics section. Next, you can enter a name for your new search topic and select a category, as shown in Figure 14.8.
Click on the + icon near Rules to create a new rule, as shown in Figure 14.9.
You can create several different types of rules:
Keywords rules
Facebook page rules
Twitter rules
Custom sources rules
Private messages rules
Note
In order to create a search topic, you must have at least one search rule created.
The following sections explain the rule types.
Keyword Rules
For each keyword rule, you can select the sources and languages you want the search topic to run. Then you enter the keywords, inclusions, and exclusions.
Clicking Continue takes you to the quota check page, as shown in Figure 14.10. After a successfully quota check you can save the search topic.
Since Dynamics Social Engagement is restricted by posts, it is helpful to analyze the results of the quota check. A large result set here could easily put you over your limit and force you to pay more to continue listening. If this happens or threatens to happen, try more restrictive keywords or try adding additional restrictors. For example, instead of just using “CRM,” try “Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016.”
Facebook Page Rules
By setting Facebook rules you can search Facebook pages. Figure 14.11 shows the initial configuration page for Facebook page searching.
You can enter search criteria and click the search icon (the magnifying glass) to see results (see Figure 14.12).
Select the page you want and then click Continue to see the Quota Check page. From here, be sure to save the search topic and add additional rules as necessary.
Twitter Rules
When you set Twitter rules, you can select from the following Twitter actions:
Tweets
Replies
Retweets
Mentions
In order to use Twitter rules, you must sign in to Twitter, and to do that you click the Twitter link at the bottom of the Add Rule window. The authorization screen shown in Figure 14.13 appears.
Click the Authorize App button. When you are successfully authorized, you see a text box for searching Twitter (see Figure 14.14). Enter the keyword(s) you want to search for and click the search icon to see the results.
Select one of the results and click Continue to see the Quota Check page. After a successful quota check, make sure to save the search topic.
Custom Sources Rules
Custom sources rules allow you to select any other rule that is not by default available in the system. Figure 14.15 shows the configuration page for a custom sources rule.
The first time you go to this page, there are no custom rules available. You need to click the Custom Sources link to create a custom source. Then click the + icon to create a new custom source, as shown in Figure 14.16. As an example, you can create a custom sources rule for the MSDN forums.
Enter MSDN in the Name field (refer to Figure 14.16). In the URL field, enter the URL for the MSDN forum at the Dynamics CRM forums, which is https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-S/crm/threads?outputAs=rss. Then click the + icon. Next to the Group Details title, click Save.
Now you can go back to the search setup and add a custom sources rule (see Figure 14.17). Select the custom MSDN source you created and then click Continue. Be sure to save the search topic after the quota check is successful by clicking save.
Private Messages Rules
To configure private messages rules, you must also configure a Twitter or Facebook account because you need a valid Twitter or Facebook user to get private messages from these social media channels.
To create a social profile, go to Settings > Social Profiles. Click the + button to add a new profile, as shown in Figure 14.18.
Select whether you want to create a Facebook user, Facebook page, or Twitter profile.
Note
A private message rule, while sent privately within the social channel, will become available to all the Social Engagement users in the organization.
Provide your Twitter username and password and click the Authorize App button. Then activate the acquisition of private messages (see Figure 14.19).
Now you can go back to the Search Setup page and create a new rule for private messages. Click Continue and complete the configuration. Be sure to save the rule after the quota check.
Customizations
You can connect other external custom applications with Microsoft Social engagement to use the API endpoint. In doing so, you must add your custom solution domain to the list of allowed domains. To do that, go to Settings > Connection > Allowed Domains, as shown in Figure 14.20.
Enter the URL of your application that will connect to Microsoft Social Engagement and then click the + button. You can then use the solution URL from your custom application to include it within the Social Engagement platform.
Tip
At publication time, there is no Social Engagement software development kit (SDK) or application programming interface (API) reference document available.
Connections
The Connections page allows you to connect your Social Engagement solution with Dynamics CRM so you can create CRM records from Social Engagement. This is necessary to create and configure the automation rules you will see in the next section.
To configure the connections, navigate to Settings > Connections and click the + icon to add a new connection.
When you see the Add Connection disclaimer note, click OK.
Select the connection type, which can be CRM Online or CRM On-Premises (with Internet-Facing Deployment).
Enter the URL of your Dynamics CRM organization as well as a name, as shown in Figure 14.21.
Click right-pointing arrow icon. You might be prompted to log in on your CRM organization if you were not logged in before.
Note
Make sure your browser doesn’t have the pop-up blocker enabled when you are trying to add a new connection.
When the Authentication Required warning appears in a yellow bar at the top of the page, click on the Sign In button. Upon a successful connection, you see the page shown on Figure 14.22. On this page you can enabled, disable, or configure this as the default instance. Click the Save button to continue.
By default, only the lead and case entities are selected, but you can click Select Entities to select other entities if you want. After you select an entity, click the X in the top-right corner to close the selection window and then select the entity you just added.
Click Add More to add the entity and then click the X in the top-right corner and then Save to complete the configuration.
Automation Rules
You can use automation rules to automate a process for identifying post messages, such as those that create contacts, accounts, cases, or leads.
To configure automation rules, you must go to Settings > Automation Rules. By default, the system doesn’t come with any automation rules created. To create a new automation rule, click the + icon. The window shown in Figure 14.23 appears.
Note
You must have a CRM connection created (as explained earlier in this chapter, in the section “Connections”) in order to be able to create an automation rule.
Enter a name for your rule and then select the search topic you want to filter.
Note
The automation rules work only with Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online 2016 or later.
Scroll down so you can see the Link to CRM options (see Figure 14.24) and select the instance of your CRM online and the entity (for example, Account).
Click Save. After the automation rule is created, you can click View in Analytics to use the rule.
Analytics
The Analytics area helps you analyze the search topics you created previously in the configuration. This means users can perform analysis to determine how to react to feedback. They might, for example, react by changing a marketing campaign (if the response is negative) or increasing spending or coverage of a campaign (if it is favorable). The information gathered might also help the organization learn early on about something important that the public is talking about.
The first time you click Analytics, you see an empty dashboard. In order to see data, you might need to change the time frame or configure search topics, as described earlier in this chapter. These are the time frame options you can select:
Today
Last Week
Last Month
Custom Time Frame
If you select Custom Time Frame, you see a calendar control you can use to choose dates, as shown in Figure 14.25.
As shown in Figure 14.26, selecting a previous month gives you data that can be analyzed.
You can select filters to get a more discrete result set. In addition, you can change the search topic, as shown in Figure 14.27.
With most of the dashboard components, you can export the data to Excel by clicking the down-arrow icon in the top-right corner of the component.
The analytics dashboard is divided into the following tabs:
Conversations (see Figure 14.28)
Sentiment (see Figure 14.29)
Location (see Figure 14.30)
Sources (see Figure 14.31)
All these dashboards allow you to refine and drill down on the data, providing a rich interface from which to mine social data. In addition, on each tab there is a Posts panel on the right that you can open to see the individual posts.
Social Center
The Social Center section allows you to configure streams so you can see information in different ways than you can see it using the analytics previously shown.
The first time you access the Social Center section, no streams are created. To add one, you click the Add Stream button. The window shown in Figure 14.32 appears.
Enter a name for the stream and select a color, which can be any of the following:
Blue
Cyan
Green
Lime
Magenta
Orange
Purple
Red
Teal
Yellow
You can select all the search topics or select a particular one or ones. Also, you can apply filters.
You can change the sentiment presented by clicking the sentiment icon (which looks like a face). You then have the option to select the value to positive, neutral, or negative for the selected post. When you manually change the sentiment this way, the sentiment icon for the messages appears with a star icon in it, as shown at the top of Figure 14.33.
Clicking the user icon on the right of the post allows you to assign the message to a user so another user can take care of replying or setting the sentiment value.
Clicking the line bellow the user icon allows you to set a label for the message.
Publish Pane
On the left side of the Social Center page, you can see the Publish pane collapsed. You can select it to expand it, and depending on the social profiles configured in the Settings area, you may get the option to select a post type.
Select the post type, and you can compose a post message to either Twitter or Facebook from here. Click Send to post the message to the social type selected.
Activity Maps
The Activity Maps section shows posts geographically and allows you to view them graphically on a map. To create an activity map, navigate to the Activity Maps section and click the + icon.
You can create two main activity map types:
Buzz map—A map that displays post volume
Sentiment map—A map that displays sentiment values based on location
These are the default time span options you can select:
Past 30 Minutes
Past Hour
Past 12 Hours
Past 24 Hours
After you choose the options you want and click Save, you see an Open button that you can click to see the activity map. Figure 14.34 shows an example of an activity map.
You can use the Area Filter control to filter by area or by country (see Figure 14.35).
You can expand the Insights pane on the left and/or the Posts pane on the right to see more detailed information about the phrases and post messages analyzed (see Figure 14.36).
To create a new alert click the + button. You can create two main types of alerts:
Post alert—With a post alert, you get an alert when a post message matches the filters you specify. You also have the option to send an email to the recipient email addresses you configure for each alert, as shown in Figure 14.37.
Trend alert—You can use a trend alert to send an alert when the volume of the post messages exceeds the statistical number expected (see Figure 14.38).
Note
You must add at least one email address to the recipient list in order to create an alert.
Post and trend alerts are extremely important when you’re configuring brand awareness. A good example of when to use a trend alert is to monitor one (or more) of your brands; if the volume (or trend) exceeds normal volume, this might be an indicator that something is up. In the event of a new product release, that can be a good thing. You can measure the reception of the product by comparing the trend data gathered with this release to data gathered for previous releases.
Connecting with Dynamics CRM
To connect Microsoft Dynamics Social Engagement with Dynamics CRM, in the Dynamics CRM web interface, select Settings > Administration and click Microsoft Social Engagement Configuration. You then see the Microsoft Social Engagement Disclaimer page. Click the Continue button on this page and then select the Microsoft Social Engagement Solution, as shown in Figure 14.39, and click Select.
If you have previously configured social engagement, you can optionally reset the data. Click Confirm, and you see a message asking you to confirm removal of previous data. Click Confirm.
After you establish the connection between Dynamics CRM and Dynamics Social Engagement, you can enable or disable this connection by going to Settings > Administration > System Settings. You can find the option to disable social engagement on the General tab (see Figure 14.40).
After the connection is completed, you can configuration the integration. The following sections explain in detail how to do this.
Social Insights Controls for CRM Entity Forms
Once Social Engagement is successfully connected with Dynamics CRM, you can add the Social component to any entity form. This section shows an example of adding it to the Account entity.
Navigate to Settings > Customizations > Customize the System. Then select > Entities > Account and Forms > Main.
Open the account main form and move to the Insert tab, where you can see the Social Insights button (see Figure 14.41).
Click the Social Insights button and enter the label text that you want to be displayed (see Figure 14.42).
Click OK to add the Social Insights control and then move to the Home tab and click Save and then click Publish.
Now if you go to any existing account record, you see the Configure Social Insights link. In Figure 14.43, this link appears in the lower-left part of the screen.
Clicking the Configure Social Insights link starts the setup wizard. On the first screen of the wizard, you can select whether to search a topic or a topic category. For this example, click Search Topic and click Next. A connection with the Social Engagement solution start, and you see the wait screen. After a few seconds you are presented with two options (see Figure 14.44):
Pick a Search Topic (if you already created search topics)
Create a New Search Topic
If you select Create a New Search Topic, you next see the screen shown in Figure 14.45.
For this example, choose a search topic you have already created and click Next. You can now select the Visuals associated with the topic (see Figure 14.46).
You can select from 16 different visuals:
Analytics Summary
Buzz
Languages
Languages Share of Voice
Locations
Most Active Authors
Recent Posts
Sentiment History
Sentiment Share of Voice
Sentiment Summary by Sources
Source History
Sources Share by Voice
Sources Summary
Trend
Volume History
You can add more than one visual here (see Figure 14.47). When you are done selecting the visuals, click the Finish button.
Figure 14.48 shows the Social visual displayed on the form. If you hover your mouse over this control, you see three small icons in the top-right corner.
The first icon, which looks like a pencil on top of a bar graph, allows you to change the visuals. The second icon, which shows a pencil over a magnifying glass, start the setup wizard again, allowing you to change the search topic or create a new search topic. The last icon, the trash can, removes the Social Insights control from the form. If you click the trash can icon, you need to confirm the removal, as shown in Figure 14.49.
If you click the Confirm button, the configurations are removed from the entity record.
To learn more about entity form customization, refer to Chapter 22, “Customizing Entities.”
Social Insights Controls for a CRM Dashboards
In the previous section, you added a Social Insights control to an entity form, but you can also add one or many of these controls to any system or personal CRM dashboard. When you create or edit a dashboard, you see a Social Insights button on the command bar (see Figure 14.50).
Clicking this button starts the same setup wizard you use to add a Social Insights control to an entity form.
Complete the wizard by selecting or creating a new search topic and adding the visuals you want to be displayed. Then save and close the Dashboard Designer. Figure 14.51 shows an example of a new dashboard.
Summary
This chapter looks at the Microsoft Dynamics Social Engagement solution that Microsoft offers through Office 365 subscriptions. It reviews the configuration of the search topics and global settings, and it looks at the Analytics, Social Center, Activity Maps, and Message Center areas. Finally, this chapter shows how to add Social Insights visuals in Dynamics CRM entity forms and dashboards and how you can connect Microsoft Dynamics Social Engagement with Microsoft Dynamics CRM.