Connect to Microsoft Social Listening

 

Applies To: Dynamics CRM 2013

Your customers and stakeholders are talking about you somewhere on Facebook, Twitter, or blogs. How do you learn about it? Well, in Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online Spring ‘14, you can get powerful social insights by connecting Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online to Microsoft Social Listening. Microsoft Social Listening collects data from social media websites and presents it to you in easy-to-consume charts and graphs that you can use to spot emerging trends in people’s comments, whether they’re positive, negative, or neutral. You can drill down into the data and see who is mentioning you, where they posted the comment, and exactly what they said. Armed with these insights, you can pinpoint what you’re doing right, and address potential issues before bigger problems arise.

Note

This feature is available to you only if your organization has transitioned to the Microsoft Online Services environment. Also, this feature isn’t available in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 Service Pack 1 (SP1) or earlier versions of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013.

With social insights, you bring social media data directly into the CRM dashboards and entity forms. As an administrator, you configure the connection to Microsoft Social Listening and add the Social Insights controls to the entity forms and system dashboards. You use the Social Insights controls to specify what social data you want to see and in what form you want this data to be presented to you. When you set up the Social Insights controls, you choose a search topic or search topic category and visuals. For the search topic you may choose your company name to listen to what is said in the social media about company or your product. Or, you may want to know about what is said about your accounts, then you choose a search topic category, Accounts. After you choose the search topic or search category, you pick the visuals. It can be a graph or chart, or some other visual representation of data. You can find a lot of interesting, useful and easy to follow information about social listening and social insights in CRM in this book: eBook: Microsoft Social Listening for CRM.

Note

Before you can set up the Social Insights controls in CRM, you have to add the search topic categories and visuals for your CRM organization in Microsoft Social Listening. However, you can add the search topics in Microsoft Social Listening or directly in CRM. See the Microsoft Social Engagement Help Center

Connect to Microsoft Social Listening for Social Insights

To configure the connection, you need to have a subscription to Microsoft Social Listening, be an authorized Microsoft Social Listening user and have a Microsoft Social Listening instance provisioned for this CRM instance.

  1. Make sure you have the System Administrator security role or equivalent permissions in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. 

    Check your security role

    • Follow the steps in View your user profile.

    • Don’t have the correct permissions? Contact your system administrator.

  2. Follow the steps for the app you’re using.

    If using the CRM web application

    1. On the nav bar, click or tap Microsoft Dynamics CRM > Settings.

      Settings appears on the nav bar.

    2. Click or tap Settings > Administration > Microsoft Social Listening Configuration.

    If using CRM for Outlook

    1. In the Navigation Pane, expand your organization if necessary, and then click or tap Settings > System > Administration > Microsoft Social Listening Configuration.
  3. You’re presented with the legal disclaimer. To accept the disclaimer, click or tap Continue. You’ll then proceed to the configuration page.

    Note

    You’re asked to accept this disclaimer once, when you connect for the first time.

  4. On the Microsoft Social Listening Configuration page, in the Select the Microsoft Social Listening solution to connect to dropdown box, click or tap the Microsoft Social Listening instance to which you want to connect. Click or tap the Select button next to the dropdown box. The Select button becomes grayed out to indicate that the selection is confirmed.

Warning

If you want to switch to a different Microsoft Social Listening instance, you are asked to confirm it by clicking or tapping the Confirm button. Changing the Microsoft Social Listening instance, may cause any existing Social Insights controls on forms and dashboards to display error messages, because the new instance may not have matching data. All existing Social Insights controls may need to be reconfigured. Also, the existing Social Insights data in CRM may need to be reset to remove references to the old instance data.

Note

In Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online Spring ‘14, only one Microsoft Social Listening instance is provided for connection to the CRM instance.

Reset Social Insights

Warning

This action deletes all existing data in CRM for the search topics, search topic categories and visuals for Social Insights.

  1. Make sure you have the System Administrator security role or equivalent permissions in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. 

    Check your security role

    • Follow the steps in View your user profile.

    • Don’t have the correct permissions? Contact your system administrator.

  2. Follow the steps for the app you’re using.

    If using the CRM web application

    1. On the nav bar, click or tap Microsoft Dynamics CRM > Settings.

      Settings appears on the nav bar.

    2. Click or tap Settings > Administration > Microsoft Social Listening Configuration.

    If using CRM for Outlook

    1. In the Navigation Pane, expand your organization if necessary, and then click or tap Settings > System > Administration > Microsoft Social Listening Configuration.
  3. On the Microsoft Social Listening Configuration page, click or tap Reset Social Insights. The Reset Social Insights Confirmation message box appears, click or tap Confirm, if you want to proceed, otherwise click or tap Cancel.

Add the Social Insights control to a CRM entity form

To add Social Insights controls to an entity (record type) form, you have to use the form editor provided in the CRM Customization area. You can position the Social Insights control anywhere on the form and resize it, just like you would do with the iFrame controls. You can make the control bigger by increasing the number of rows and spanning the control over several columns. This is important if you want to make a graph or a chart in the control appear larger and be more readable. More information: Use the form editor.

  1. Make sure you have the System Administrator security role or equivalent permissions in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. 

    Check your security role

    • Follow the steps in View your user profile.

    • Don’t have the correct permissions? Contact your system administrator.

  2. Follow the steps for the app you’re using.

    If using the CRM web application

    1. On the nav bar, click or tap Microsoft Dynamics CRM > Settings.

      Settings appears on the nav bar.

    2. Click or tap Settings > Customization > Customize the System.

    If using CRM for Outlook

    1. In the Navigation Pane, expand your organization if necessary, and then click or tap Settings > System > Customization > Customize the System.
  3. In the Navigation Pane, under Components, expand Entities.

  4. Expand the entity that you want to add the Social Insights control to. Double-click or tap Forms.

  5. In the grid view, click or tap the entity’s Main form. The entity form opens.

  6. Select the Insert tab. At the top of the form, on the ribbon, click the Social Insights icon. In the setup dialog box, fill out the required fields, such as the unique name of the control and the label name. Click or tap OK. The Social Insights control is now added to the entity form. You can resize the control or move the control to another location on the form.

  7. Switch back to the Home tab. Click or tap Save and then click or tap Publish to publish the added customizations. The control called Configure Social Insights appears on all records based on this form. The search topics, search categories and visuals can be added to the control.

Note

You don’t need administrator permissions to set up Social Insights on the entity record.

Add and set up Social Insights controls on the system dashboards

Note

You don’t need administrator permissions to add and set up Social Insights controls on the personal dashboard.

You can add the Social Insights controls to the existing system dashboards or to a new dashboard. Let’s create a new dashboard and add the Social Insights control to it. We’ll use the Set Up Social Insights wizard to lead us through the setup. Shortly after the setup is finished and customizations are published, the charts and graphs with social data will appear on your dashboard.

  1. Make sure you have the System Administrator security role or equivalent permissions in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. 

    Check your security role

    • Follow the steps in View your user profile.

    • Don’t have the correct permissions? Contact your system administrator.

  2. Follow the steps for the app you’re using.

    If using the CRM web application

    1. On the nav bar, click or tap Microsoft Dynamics CRM > Settings.

      Settings appears on the nav bar.

    2. Click or tap Settings > Customization > Customize the System.

    If using CRM for Outlook

    1. In the Navigation Pane, expand your organization if necessary, and then click or tap Settings > System > Customization > Customize the System.
  3. In the Navigation Pane, under Components, click or tap Dashboards.

  4. Click or tap New on the command bar. Choose a layout and click or tap Create.

  5. On the dashboard form, enter the name of the dashboard in the Name text box and click or tap Save.

  6. To add the control, click or tap Insert Social Insights icon in the center of the section on the dashboard form, or click or tap More Commands (More commands icon) on the command bar and then click or tap Social Insights in the dropdown list. Set Up Social Insights wizard appears.

  7. In the Set Up Social Insights wizard, click or tap Advanced. The Add Social Insights dialog appears. Fill in the required fields and click or tap OK. You can also use the default values and click or tap OK or Cancel to close the dialog box.

  8. In the Set Up Social Insights wizard main window, click or tap Search topic or Search topic category, and then click or tap Next.

  9. To pick the search topic or the search topic category, in the dropdown list, click or tap the topic or the category, depending on what you chose in the previous step and then click or tap Next.

    Note

    You can create a new search topic, instead of choosing a search topic in the dropdown list. Click or tap Create a new search topic, fill in the required fields and click or tap Next.

  10. In the visuals drop-down list, click or tap a graph or a chart you want, such as Analytics summary, Recent posts or Trends. You can add as many visuals as you want and move them up and down the list using the MOVE UP and MOVE DOWN arrows. You can also delete a visual by clicking or tapping the delete icon displayed to the right of the visual. Click or tap Finish.

  11. On the command bar, click or tap Save and then click or tap Close.

  12. To publish the customizations, click or tap Publish All Customizations on the command bar. After the customizations are published, you can see the social insights on your dashboard in Microsoft Dynamics CRM > Dashboards.

See Also

Administration Guide for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013
Control social data
eBook: Social listening for Dynamic businesses
Microsoft Social Engagement Help Center

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