Blog

This 2009 holiday season, not only do we look back on accomplishments at work and in our personal lives, but we remember those we unfortunately lost. Here at Scout Labs we remember our teammate Matt Ericson whom we lost to Lymphoma this year. Matt was young and active when he headed to Europe for a 3-week vacation with his wife Kirsten. He returned from his European vacation and went straight from the airport to the hospital. He got his Lymphoma diagnosis, underwent treatment and passed away all within a nine-month span.

In fact, every four minutes someone is diagnosed with a blood cancer, and every 10 minutes someone dies from a blood cancer. To help find a cure for lymphoma and other blood-related cancers, Scout Labs is supporting a non-profit called the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS). It is the world’s largest voluntary health organization dedicated to funding blood cancer research, education and patient services. Our goal, hopefully with your help, is to raise $10K.

There are two ways you can donate:
Donate Securely Online
Or mail a check or money order payable to The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society to:
Attn: Randy Ksar
809 11th Ave. 
Sunnyvale, CA 94089 

Remember, now - more than ever - your support is critical. We must accelerate our efforts to find cures for leukemia, Hodgkin and non-Hodgkin lymphoma and myeloma, and to offer support to all those touched by blood cancers. Scout Labs is steadfast in our commitment to cure blood cancers and to improve the quality of life of patients and their families.

Please help us spread the word! That’s what we in social media are good at :-) Help us reach our 2009 holiday goal of $10,000 by donating here:
http://svmb.lls.llsevent.org/scoutlabs

Questions? Comment on this blog post or tweet us at @scoutlabs

Thank you for your support and have a very happy and healthy holiday and New Year.

— Jennifer and the Scout Labs Team

Here at Scout Labs we figured the best holiday gift we could give our users would be some new features. So here’s a quick recap of recently released features, including some we deployed just last night:

• New search OVERVIEW page. Everyone wanted a single screen dashboard that would aggregate the most telling graphs, the leading indicators, and most important social media content. Welcome to the new OVERVIEW page. Instead of clicking from tab to tab within your search, you can now get a snapshot of buzz volume, sentiment trend and top stories from Twitter, Blogs, and everywhere else on a single page.

• Interactive graphs. We were as disappointed as all of you when we had to pull back from our earlier interactive graphs implementation, which used Flash technologies not universally supported by corporate sanctioned browsers, and rely on an image based solution that was not clickable. But now interactive graphs are back, and they’re bigger and better than before. You can hover over a particular day to see the counts; click into spikes to read what happened; and of course still customize your date range within the last 6 months or export the data in a .csv.
  One thing we did lose in the transition was the ability to export graphs as a .png. We’ll eventually bring it back for you, Steve Majewski, but in the meantime, take a screenshot- there new graphs are much better looking than their PNG predecessors!

• Ability to sign up your colleagues up to receive email alerts. Many of you asked for this feature because you wanted us to send your favorite email alerts directly to other team members, instead of having to forward them yourselves. Now, instead of forwarding Scout Labs alerts, you can simply CC other users on your alerts. And opting out is as simple as clicking on a link within the email. So now you can sign your teammates up for alerts for your brand, a competitor’s campaign, or whatever else you might be tracking.

• Links to source included in exports. Now the number of links to each source is included in the export files. Mike Arauz and Spencer Waldron, that one was for you guys.

It was such an honor to have James Smith, VP of Advertising for Disney Online (Disney.com, Family.com, FamilyFun, Kaboose and BabyZone), up on stage with me at Web 2.0 in New York talking about one aspect of “operationalizing” social media - measuring campaign effectiveness and real-time optimization. His deep-dive case study had the entire audience sitting up straight and taking frantic notes.

James eloquently walked through data and graphs showing how he and his team use social media data from Scout Labs throughout the lifecycle of major Disney Online campaigns.

• Pre-sales. Disney uses Scout Labs to offer a new dimension to the traditional media metrics firms. According to the old-school metrics, Disney and competitor properties were “equal”, but when you looked at the social media metrics for Disney properties, they won hands-down. Disney’s properties are clearly earning more social media buzz and attention than its competitors, which if great data to share if you are trying to close a big deal!
• Mid-campaign. Of course, Disney doesn’t rest on its laurels once its won a big media partnership. It launches a major media campaign and aggressively tracks buzz, sentiment, sentiment trending and even customer quotes to understand the impacts its efforts are having out in the real world. They have developed a smart methodology of creating benchmarks of key social media metrics before launch, then measuring lift and optimizing tactics throughout the campaign to ensure maximum impact and effectiveness.
• Post-campaign. At the end of a promotion or campaign, everyone wants to see metrics. Thanks to a continuously updated dashboard, at least on the social media side, there are few surprises at the end. But Disney takes the all-important step of combining e-commerce and other “hard” business success metrics with the social media impact data (as well as quotes from customers during the campaign) to give a more complete picture of campaign success.

Disney is a marvelous example of a company that constantly evolves its marketing discipline in keeping with the marketplace. They embrace new tools and technologies and look to new and deeper sources of market data—like social media—for success metrics. And you don’t have to be one of the biggest and most beloved brands in the world to have access to this kind of data and to engage in real-time campaign tracking and optimization. You just have to be as smart as Disney to choose Scout Labs ;-)

It was such an honor to have James Smith, VP of Advertising for Disney Online (Disney.com, Family.com, FamilyFun, Kaboose and BabyZone), up on stage with me at Web 2.0 in New York talking about one aspect of “operationalizing” social media - measuring campaign effectiveness and real-time optimization. His deep-dive case study had the entire audience sitting up straight and taking frantic notes.

James eloquently walked through data and graphs showing how he and his team use social media data from Scout Labs throughout the lifecycle of major Disney Online campaigns.

• Pre-sales. Disney uses Scout Labs to offer a new dimension to the traditional media metrics firms. According to the old-school metrics, Disney and competitor properties were “equal”, but when you looked at the social media metrics for Disney properties, they won hands-down. Disney’s properties are clearly earning more social media buzz and attention than its competitors, which if great data to share if you are trying to close a big deal!
• Mid-campaign. Of course, Disney doesn’t rest on its laurels once its won a big media partnership. It launches a major media campaign and aggressively tracks buzz, sentiment, sentiment trending and even customer quotes to understand the impacts its efforts are having out in the real world. They have developed a smart methodology of creating benchmarks of key social media metrics before launch, then measuring lift and optimizing tactics throughout the campaign to ensure maximum impact and effectiveness.
• Post-campaign. At the end of a promotion or campaign, everyone wants to see metrics. Thanks to a continuously updated dashboard, at least on the social media side, there are few surprises at the end. But Disney takes the all-important step of combining e-commerce and other “hard” business success metrics with the social media impact data (as well as quotes from customers during the campaign) to give a more complete picture of campaign success.

Disney is a marvelous example of a company that constantly evolves its marketing discipline in keeping with the marketplace. They embrace new tools and technologies and look to new and deeper sources of market data—like social media—for success metrics. And you don’t have to be one of the biggest and most beloved brands in the world to have access to this kind of data and to engage in real-time campaign tracking and optimization. You just have to be as smart as Disney to choose Scout Labs ;-)