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There is a lot of confusion out there. Many of the posts and tweets about social media monitoring and brand monitoring these days are asking, “What application should I use? Which app is the best? Who has used what? What do you think?” Very often, the RFPs I receive and the questions I am asked about our platform are pretty surface-skimming. “Does it have Twitter?” is a fine question, but there are so many more tough questions you should be asking all of us.

Don’t even ask me which platform is best. You already know my answer is Scout Labs. I have no credibility there. But, having thought about this and worked on the technology for nearly 3 years, I do think I have credibility in offering up a checklist of things to look for and to think about if you are choosing a social media analysis platform for your company. I will get the list started but I hope that you will add your own thoughts:

1. How many months of live data are you serving in the application? (I need to be able to read all the posts and also see trending graphs).
2. Do you price based on the number of results returned or otherwise limit the number of results that I can see? Or do you return all the search results for my topics?
3. What social media content types do you index?
4. Can I add sources if I don’t see them in your app? How fast does it take to see them in results?
5. How good are your spam filters? What percentage are your algorithms catching as compared to human-scores? How often do you mis-classify something as spam?
6. If you say its spam, can I see what you filtered out? Can I add them back in to my main results?
7. Can I curate the results for my team? E.g. If I think a result is either irrelevant or spam, can I flag it as such and will it be instantly removed from the results?
8. Can I order mentions within a given date range by importance - what’s most important to pay attention to - or is it just by date?
9. What sentiment-related features do you offer? Is it just positive and negative scoring, or can you identify other customer emotions?
10. With regard to sentiment (positive / negative / neutral) how accurate are your sentiment scores? Specifically, how often does your algorithm agree with human scorers? When is the last time you tested your algorithm versus human scores?
11. How are you improving your algorithms over time?
12. Do you do only go-forward sentiment scoring (as posts come in, after you create a search)?
13. Or can you back-fill sentiment scores for old things that were posted before I created my search? If so, is there an addition charge for backfill? How long does it take to back-fill sentiment for all my searches?
14. Does the application support multiple people / departments and groups in the company? Is it easy to add people? How much do you charge additional users or is it free?
15. Is there a way to “bookmark” and tag interesting content as my team finds things and people that we want to remember?
16. Can I annotate things I see with my own commentary and tags, so that my colleagues can see my thoughts?
17. From when a customer posts to when it is live in your application, what is the lag time (by media type)?
18. How long does it take for a dashboard to populate from search creation?
19. Is everything totally automated or do you have your analysts or outsourced labor doing some part of it?
20. How much honing and set-up of the results need to happen to get really good results?
21. How much training time would you say is required to become an expert at using the system?
22. What is the average number of users that are using your platform within a typical company. One? Twenty?
23. How do you price? What’s the cost for an addition person to get access? Is there any limit on the number of search results that you return to me?
24. If you do limit the number of searches that you return to me, (e.g. 10,000) and I do a search on “Google”, say, that clearly has far more than 10,000 results, what do subset do you show me? What am I not seeing?

We don’t mind the softball-inquiries when they are thrown to us. But we know that Scout Labs stands up to very rigorous scrutiny, so bring it on. I hope this makes you a more sophisticated reviewer of platforms and writer of RFPs. I also hope that this forces more data into the discussion about social media platforms and raises the level of discourse throughout the category.

On the front page of the Business section of the New York Times today, Alex Wright did a good write-up on sentiment analysis and how it is being used by companies on a daily basis to make better business decisions. He features Scout Labs and a use case from one of our clients, StubHub, on how they are proactively solving customer problems in the moment and also improving corporate policies as a result of the sentiment feedback they get from Scout Labs. “This is a canary in a coal mine for us,” said John Whelan, StubHub’s director of customer service, in the New York Times article.

In such a short format, Alex wasn’t able to talk much about how Scout Labs’ sentiment works and the unique way that we improve algorithms by learning from user feedback. Nor did he talk about how Scout Labs goes beyond just rants and raves, with emotions like Recommendations, Caveats, and Comparisons, delivered by our QUOTES feature. But we are honored that when he thought “sentiment for business” he thought of Scout Labs.

I’d like to give a huge thanks to the team at StubHub who spent time with Alex talking him through how StubHub organizes, staffs, prioritizes, acts and plans differently thanks to sentiment insight from Scout Labs. Only one story made it into the article (the story of the Yankees-Red Sox rain-out, the immediately customer service response, and the policy review underway), but I think it’s a great example because it highlights what is so important to us at Scout Labs: Insight + Action.

Really forward-looking companies like StubHub proactively identify operational issues and product opportunities, and assess marketing performance using opinions expressed in social media. Really smart companies are always looking for the why behind the buzz - the qualitative insights that help organizations understand better and innovate faster. Really competitive companies make tangible changes to products and policies in response to customers. StubHub is one company who is absolutely putting the voice of the customer at the heart of the organization and reaping great rewards.

The companies who can listen better and innovate faster DO have a strategic competitive advantage. We’re all too happy to help.

Nice picture of Margaret and Mars (and Julie in the background!)

Source: Peter DaSilva for The New York Times