My conversation this morning with John Jantsch about Scout Labs was especially interesting because we chatted about the application through the lens of his readership—small business marketers.
After he got the elevator pitch, he pointed out that while the analysis and insight we offer might be groundbreaking for the big brands, “the rest of what you describe sounds like what people can already cobble together with free tools ala Google, etc.”
It was nice to have spoken to enough real people who are really sick of their cobbled solutions around CGM to know that there is a very real demand for something cohesive. He did agree that the application sounds like it delivers a lot more than what people can get for free, but that he wasn’t sure that all that extra market intelligence would be valuable to small business marketers.
He thought the idea of a configurable dashboard of ‘insight modules’ - blog volume, sentiment detection, key influencers, etc. was pretty interesting, however, and when we talked more explicitly about the functionality and the specific nuggets of insight delivered, he definitely saw how small businesses would find many of the analysis modules plenty useful.
I think the mention of jump-in functionality piqued his interest the most. He was expressly keen on seeing a tool that could help enable, manage and organize conversation threads and couldn’t believe this wasn’t the first thing out of my mouth in the elevator pitch. (I love finding out what matters to people!)
The fact that users can scout pretty much anything within the same tool for the same price was also a base hit. In any case, he enthusiastically awaits his beta invitation!
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