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The Scout Labs application has a whole new look and feel today and it supports an exciting new feature.

New Feature: QUOTES

When you dive into the dashboard of one of your searches today, alongside Sentiment and Graphs and such is a new tab called QUOTES. Scout Labs already give you lots of quantitative metrics to help you measure your brand (buzz is up, positive sentiment is down…) But QUOTES is a little different. Inspired by WeFeelFine (although much harder to execute, because we are looking for opinions and emotions about a particular product or brand), QUOTES offers qualitative insight into the mind of the customer, for companies wanting to know: “What do our customers love, hate, want, think and feel about us right now?”

The QUOTES feature pulls from social media customer opinions and emotions being expressed about any topic. Today, Scout Labs automatically populates QUOTES relevant to the following categories:
Love: Raves for the product or brand
Hate: Rants by unhappy customers
Wish: What customers WISH your company would do, add, change, improve. Feature requests and ideas.
Compare: Ways that your brand is being considered alongside others. Who’s better than who? What are customers switching to when the abandon you?
Recommend: When people highly recommend you, what do they say? What’s the favorite thing? What do they recommend you do differently?
Issues: What problems are customers having with you? What concerns are lingering?
Caveat: Your brand advocates LOVE your product BUT… (or however….)

Quotes.png

You can see how QUOTES turns social media chatter into a live focus group of millions. Scout Labs is already a leader in the use of natural language processing to analyze social media for the world’s best brands. With the addition of QUOTES, we raise the bar and deliver even more insight to the hundreds of marketers, brand managers, product managers, communications professionals and executives who rely on Scout Labs to help them build better products and sell more.

New Design
The changes to the user interface will be apparent as soon as you log in. We really wanted to make it easier to scan through all of your searches and to find your collaborative actions. We also wanted to lay an architectural foundation for new features, new data and new actions that will be coming live shortly. To those ends, we have made the following changes:

  • Your list of searches are persistent on all pages now. This will make it easy to jump between searches. You can also choose to sort your searches now by alphabetical order or by the change in buzz. (A nice little touch: if you are looking at Twitter results for one search and you jump to another search, you will go to the Twitter results for the new one. That way you can scan through your searches by media type, now!)
  • All team activity (bookmarks, discussions and alerts) are front and center, in the now-persistent left nav. We have added counts, so you know how much team activity is underway.
  • Oh, and we made the design look simply AWESOME. We hope you like it.

NewDesign.png

And since we moved some things on you, here are a few important tips: to create a new search now, hit the little “plus” icon in the left nav next to “Searches”. To manage (delete, edit) your searches, click the “gears” icon in the left nav, right next to the Create a Search icon.

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We get feedback all the time that our application is intuitive and easy to use, so we were careful not to mess anything up. Let us know what you think (we know you will!)


Sharing by Twittering

· 3 comments

Twitter BirdsWhat are people twittering about? I’ve been studying sample tweets, looking for clues about how people use Twitter. One thing that’s clear is that lots of people use Twitter to share. All the numbers in this note are based on a sample of around 675,000 tweets, from early June of this year.

Approximately 20% of the tweets contain URLs. That is, one out of 5 says “Look at this! I want to share this with you!” So, what are they sharing? Figuring that out takes a little more work.

Most of those URLs (over 2/3) are shortened by services like bit.ly or tinyurl.com, with bit.ly (over half) the leader. If you start with a URL like http://www.scoutlabs.com/blog/ bit.ly will shorten it to http://bit.ly/OHe48.

That may not look like a big difference, until you remember that tweets are limited to 140 characters.

You might not know you’re using a URL shortener — a Twitter application may do this for you. Paste the shortened URL into your browser (or sometimes just click on it) and your browser will get the original URL from bit.ly and use that to fetch the web page. Or, you can simply ask bit.ly for the original URL. That’s what I did.

Of the URLs shortened by bit.ly, approximately 8% were links to YouTube. Others in the top 10 included blogspot.com, google.com (including Google Maps, Google News and Picasa, along with feedproxy), wordpress.com, nytimes.com, etsy.com, facebook.com, and flickr.com. The results for URLs shortened by tinyurl.com were similar, but they included fewer links to YouTube and Flickr, more links to craigslist.org and job sites.

Some sharing sites automatically generate short URLs — they don’t need bit.ly or tinyurl.com. Over 1 in 20 links in my sample were to twitpic.com, a site devoted to sharing photos via Twitter. About a quarter as many were to blip.fm, a music sharing site. There are a number of smaller sites dedicated to sharing maps, music, photos and video via Twitter.

Given the new integration between Flickr and Twitter I suspect that if I repeated my analysis with newer data, I would see significantly more links to Flickr.

So, what have I learned?

  1. People use Twitter to share textual content such as blog posts and news articles.
  2. People also use Twitter to share non-text content such as maps, music, photos and video.
  3. The links in tweets are a good indication of what people are interested in— right now!
  4. Because so many URLs are shortened (using bit.ly, tinyurl.com, etc.) it’s essential to look up original URLs to discover what they’re tweeting about.

I’d be interested in hearing comments and questions, along with any insights you may have about how people are using Twitter.

Image “Tweeties” by Chris Wallace. Licensed under a CC 3.0 License.