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Living in San Francisco we’re surrounded by technological early adopters, so it’s hard to believe that some companies are *still* asking this question, but it’s true.

In response I came across this awesome video from timetogetsocial that helps answer that very question.

If you, or someone you know, is still questioning the usefulness of social media for businesses, I think this video will get you one step closer to understanding its relevance for all businesses. Are you listening?

Right on the heel’s of Margaret’s post about why agencies use Scout Labs, we bring you this case study from NordicClick Interactive.

Mike McAnally is one of the founders of NordicClick, a leading web strategy and interactive marketing agency in the Midwest. Mike helped to build the agency with a strong focus on metrics, A/B testing and optimization for their sizeable roster of clients including large consumer brands and manufacturing clients.

When Mike started steering the agency towards a social media capability, like so many, the team grappled with an unwieldy mix of tracking tools. Cobbling together RSS feeds and Google alerts to harness social media activity across a variety of clients and industries was “terribly messy,” says Mike.

The NordicClick team began actively seeking a single solution that would first give them all the social media data they needed—which in an agency environment can be considerable. NordicClick needed an application that would allow for multiple users and multiple searches across a large client base that covered a dozen or more industries. The social media analysis platform they chose not only needed to be comprehensive, but also needed to help to make their practice more efficient and more effective.

“We weren’t going to make an investment in a social media practice that was just about listening,” Mike says. “Our agency motto is ‘Listen, learn and share’. We needed a platform that would let us learn about a client’s business in meaningful ways and let us share that information easily.”

Mike and his team reviewed several social media analysis platforms, but found them to be “over-engineered.” They were immediately attracted to Scout Labs as “an aggregator of all social media channels”, a collection of data from thousands of sites, but mostly to the fact that his dashboards are organized in intuitive, meaningful ways. “The interface is clean, simple and intuitive and the graphs are perfect for client-facing PowerPoints. We routinely pull screenshots from Scout Labs into our client presentations to demonstrate the insight we’re getting from social media.”

Indeed, NordicClick harvests a great deal of value for their clients from the Scout Labs platform. They routinely use Scout Labs to conduct keyword research, competitive analysis, buzz tracking, SEO audits, sentiment searches, for soft selling customer services and reputation management just to name a few.

Since the agency began using Scout Labs, “we log in at least every day and whenever we get alerts,” says Mike. “Everyone’s been trained on it, our contractors use it. We typically provide monthly and quarterly social media analysis reviews for most if not all of our clients.”

NordicClick’s approach for landing social media strategy business is to sell a social media analysis capability to all of their clients up front. Even if they don’t sign on, the team automatically sets up a workspace for the new client brand, resellers and competitors “so when we open up the workspace and they see the amazing data, the immediately sign on for the value. It’s a no-brainer.”

“I would describe Scout Labs as one big user group,” says Mike. “Excellent value for the money, it’s great for stress-testing all kinds of strategy, from keywords, to Twitter campaigns to PR.”

Jenny, the CEO of Scout Labs, and I first met while working at an agency (er- it was called marchFIRST), and it was from an agency (Razorfish) that Jenny lured me when she started Scout Labs. So many of the things I wanted to do for my clients I could not efficiently execute, due to lack of tools in market. As a former agency strategist, I have a special affinity for Scout Labs’ agency customers and the use cases they have for our platform. Here are some of the reasons agencies give me for needing a social listening platform:

1. We need to know what is happening with the client’s brand to be effective strategists. Agencies’ stock in trade, especially digital agencies and high end marketing agencies, is that they are better placed than their clients to anticipate trends and craft breakthrough marketing strategies because they have the benefit of cross-company and cross-brand experience. It isn’t possible to maintain that positioning if the account team isn’t up to speed on what’s happening with the client’s brand on Twitter and YouTube, much less their competitors’ brands.
2. We are monitoring a particular campaign. Agencies are often responsible for the design, execution and tracking of marketing campaigns. As the power of social media to reach consumers grows, agencies are more and more interested in tracking campaign performance in this channel- or even in defining campaign success by social media criteria. After all, if your big campaign idea is to let a consumer shoot your Superbowl ad, you might want to know how many people saw it, if the people who saw it liked it, and if so, why. Forwarding around a couple of Google Alerts is just not going to cut it.
3. We are engaged in a social media listening program on behalf of a client. More and more of the agencies I talk to- PR, traditional, digital, media only, creative, branding, SEM, etc- are engaged in retained listening programs on behalf of their clients. These range from pay per tweet to ad hoc studies delivered in PPT for $5-50K to inclusion of social media data in traditional brand health measures for $20K+ to outsourcing response to Twitter and blog mentions and so forth for $100K+ month.


In almost every case, the agencies that we talk to decide that they need to standardize on a single platform that can provide the backbone of their monitoring and measurement program. They may do some additional work to add proprietary or other data, or to produce custom analyses, but there is usually a core content aggregation, analysis, and metrics platform that the agency team can build on.



4. We need a common digital dashboard/ application to share across the company and the agency. A really good agency is often deeply embedded in a client organization, more like an extra arm of the clients’ organization than a “vendor” to it. It’s essential for the holistic team to be able to share a single app for content, analysis, and response.


5. We needed a tool for our own internal research and business development. Sometimes the agency just need to look really smart in a pitch, or to engage in a little research that the client isn’t exactly paying for- yet. Sometimes the agency is in the business of market research, creative development, or even product development- all of which are morphing to account for the rise of social media.

Of course none of those reasons is totally unique to Scout Labs, nor is Scout Labs the only solution in market. I see agencies using everything from free tools like Google Alerts to other agencies to help them address these use cases. Here are some of the reasons I see agencies embracing Scout Labs:

1. Easy to use for the whole team. We get consistent feedback that Scout Labs is the easiest, most intuitive, user friendly application out there, for newbies and veterans. If you’re trying to drive social media awareness throughout a Fortune 1000, you need an application that the masses can use. A lone specialist does not organizational change create.
2. Ad hoc search. None of this advance commitment to a lone word or phrase- “Neutrogena”- and only that word, for which data begins accumulating when you contract for it. Agencies not only need data now, they need some trend on it- and who wants to wait 6 months for 6 months back data? And what if that initial scan turns up issues around self-tanning or an ingredient like pomegranate? Agencies need to see trends and data on those, too.
3. Real time market intelligence. People are flabbergasted at how fast it is get data across across all social media channels. Especially people who have used other platforms that have a lag to their data collection. Being able to not just retrieve the data fast, but get speedy analysis of it- frequent words, back sentiment, 6 month graphs- likewise gratifies the time starved agency strategist.
4. Saved items, graphs, and exports. So your deliverable needs to be on the agency PPT template/ HTML email/ Flash presentation. We understand. Scout Labs make it easy to do things like export graph data so you can make the line in the graph your client’s exact brand color, or add your client’s logo and your agency’s logo to the application header.
5. ROI! Having relatively low price points and plans with unlimited users makes this the biggest no-brainer purchase of the year. Go check out prices and see. With Scout Labs you get the productivity boost of a dozen interns for the cost of less than one, just on the content aggregation side- before you even get into metrics and insight from our NLP driven features that no intern is going to provide.

This isn’t a complete list of either use cases or reasons to choose Scout Labs, but it’s getting to be a long post. I’m always open to hearing from agencies about what they need to be more effective on behalf of their clients. Please share it- you might get pleasantly surprised by what we have in development for you.

Haiti. It was a terrible terrible disaster. By most estimates 200,000 people lost their lives.

But according to Esther Duflo, a TED speaker today on stage at TED2010, Haiti happens every 8 days. 9 million children under the age of 5 die every year from poverty-related causes. 1 million die each year from Malaria alone. That’s 1 million lives that could be saved with a $10 bed net. Duflo’s research shows that if you give bed nets to poor families, 80%+ will use them right away, and months later, they invest their own money in buying more bed nets for their families because they see that it saves lives.

But we don’t talk about Malaria very much. In the chart below, the total mentions of Malaria is the yellow line across the bottom. Basically nothing.

The media tends to gravitate toward covering dramatic events that happen quickly and can be covered in short bursts. People dying in great numbers every single day is not news, for some reason.

Jamie Oliver echoed the thought today when he accepted the 2010 TedPrize for his work as a healthy-eating activist. He said TV is filled with talk of homicides and drownings and the like. Your chances of dying from homocide? 1 in 314. Chances of drowning? 1 in 1,008. Obesity-related diseases are the leading causes of death. You have a 1 in 5 chance of dying of heart disease and a 1 in 7 chance of dying of cancer. Stroke? 1 in 24. However, mentions of drowning are neck and neck with heart-disease and obesity:

Obesity did rise above the fray this past week (note the recent spike) when Michelle Obama announced a campaign against childhood obesity. On stage Jamie saluted her commitment but set out the following wish for the coming year:

In TED fashion, countless people and organizations around the world, inspired by Jamie’s passion and commitment, stood up to commit money, time, web site development, access to prominent people, office space, media time, even buses for road-trips to schools. Congratulations to Jamie Oliver, the Brit, for winning the TEDPrize and for working so hard to save American kids.

All the TED Talk videos will be posted online for all to see starting in about a month. Stay tuned and join in.

Being the ROI leader is very important to us. We don’t make the decision to change prices lightly. But we did change them this week for a few reasons. First, we have added a tremendous amount of data and functionality since our launch nearly a year ago! And we continue to make huge investments in technology in order to give you context - to help you know where and when to pay attention. Importance ranking, emerging meme detection, customer quotes extraction, sentiment scoring (that you can override and improve), spam and porn filters, de-duping, beautiful dashboards, etc.

Don’t let the simple, intuitive interface fool you. We do hard, expensive stuff. And the pace will not slow down. As one analyst recently said about us, “You guys are on fire.”

New: Price Increases
Since launch last year, our 5-search plan has been $99 per month. Now the Standard (5 searches) plan is $199 per month. Check out the new prices here. If this sounds steep to you, keep in mind who our competitors are and what their price points are (if you can find them listed somewhere!). Some are tens of thousands per month. Many are in the $500 to $2000 per month range. Even after this price change, we have five options all under $500 per month: $199, $249, $299, $449, $499. All of these plans deliver unlimited search results and support teams of users. Scout Labs still offers the most data and functionality for the least expense. We call that the best ROI in the market.

We do still offer discounts for annual contracts - buy 10 months, get a full year of access (a 17% discount). In fact, those customers currently on pre-paid annual plans have current pricing locked in for the duration of their contracts.

New: Two Plan Levels
Beginning this week, we have two tiers of functionality to choose from - Standard and Professional. There’s a Assignments feature, provides 6 months back data and allows for the export of results and underlying graph data.

New: More Choices
We still do not charge by the number of results returned (e.g. $X for up to 10,000 results, with no warning of what the monthly bill will ultimately be). Unlimited results are part of every plan. We still do price by the number of things you want to monitor concurrently - in other words, the total number of searches in use. We used to have a 5-search plan, then a 25-search plan, and then higher. Some customers said 5 was too little and other companies said 25 was too much so we added a 10-search level as well. Now you will have stepping stones that are closer together if and when you need to upgrade.

Scout Labs is not for everyone. But we are the simplest, most intuitive way for teams to measure and manage social media. New users, you should try us and see what you think for yourself, with a 14-day free trial. Existing users on monthly plans, we hope you see the value and we will work with you to make sure we find a new plan tier that works for both your team’s needs and budget. Email support@scoutlabs.com with questions or if you want to lock in current pricing by paying upfront for an annual subscription.

—Jennifer

Those of you who are existing Scout Labs customers may have noticed a whole heap o’ changes in the application when you logged in yesterday- all of them originally requested by more than one of you. While we often release new features, these changes present a particularly big leap forward on data and functionality. We are pretty excited about this release! In order of customer popularity:

• Assignments. Now all existing customers and Professional Plan subscribers have a feature that enables them to create a task based on any piece of social media data found in the application. Photo, video, Tweet or post, you can assign the item to a team member to read or respond to. Assignment are automatically emailed to assignees and status tracked in the application, which provides a nifty dashboard for seeing how fast your team actually responds. Of course there is an export available for all assignments. See Jenny’s recent post for a great rant on why this functionality is so key to the socially empowered organization.
• Forums data. With this release, Scout Labs now offers coverage of millions of English language forums. This is especially great news for our customers in the automotive, electronics, gaming industries. There’s always a breaking in period when we add new data to the system, so if there is a source you want and don’t see in our content coverage, please use the link at the bottom of every page to suggest the source to us, and we’ll do what we can to add it (you get an email back from the system). Take a look at how much recent Toyota client is on forums:


• Breakdown of volume by social media type. Now you can break down social media coverage by media type- blogs, Twitter, forums, etc. You can compare totals of individual media types for different searches- who’s bigger on blogs? On forums?


One caveat is that the graphable Twitter data is a historical sampling of Twitter data, representing about 5-10% of total Tweet volume. The only companies we know of that have full Twitter feed data right now are Twitter, MSFT and GOOG. We do hope that Twitter will soon make the full feed available more broadly. In the meantime you can click into the graphs to dive into the mentions for a particular data type and time period.





• News Data. There’s now a breakout of new data, so you can see the interaction between news stories and consumer attention as evidenced by social media activity. We define news as content from a traditional news provider (NYTimes), regardless of format (example: bit.blogs.nytimes), news articles coming from a syndicated news provider (an AP story published by a news aggregator), and articles coming from mainstream media publishers (Wired, Sport Illustrated). Under these criteria, well-established mega blogs like The Huffington Post are categorized as blogs, not news, even though they focus on newsy content.


We’ve heard for some time that showing some news content along with social media content is a great way for those team members who might be less familiar with social media to more directly see the correlation between items in the news, which everyone in the organization already takes seriously, and mentions in social media, which many are still struggling to evaluate.

• Save items inline. This feature replaces the previous Bookmarks feature, with some cool new twists. Now you can save an item right from the summary view, and email a colleague or team member right when you do it. Scout Labs saves these items indefinitely, so they never “disappear” from the system. Just another way Scout Labs is making it easier for you to collaborate within your team.

There are a host of more minor improvements sprinkled throughout the application, like the ability to review and/ or change sentiment values inline, but those are the big improvements. We hope you’ll agree they’re for the better!

I haven’t written a Scout Labs “vision” post in a while, but now is the time. Because the new enhancements that come online today take Scout Labs closer to our vision than ever before. Today’s release incorporates lots more data - more forums, more news, more Tweets - and offers more powerful (and beautiful) graphing capabilities. Our product team will detail those enhancements in an upcoming post. What I want to discuss today are the new collaboration features and place them on the backdrop of the Scout Labs mission.

We founded this company upon a fundamental belief: that brands are protected in “packs”; that listening should NOT be one person’s job, but the every day job of many. The un-mediated voice of the customer should flow to the desktop of everyone - Product teams, Marketing teams, Customer Service departments, senior executives, PR teams, and the Agencies and Agents of all of the above. When the voice of the customer is in the hands of knowledgeable people, innovation happens - new product ideas, new marketing ideas, new service ideas, new connections with customers.

Collaboration at Scout Labs
So, “collaboration” is a not a FEATURE for Scout Labs. It’s not a thing that we launch in month 10. It’s a belief system and vision that permeates our product, our UI, our pricing model and, yes, even our technology and our algorithms. Because if you believe that listening is the job of TEAMS, not an individual, you build your app in a very particular way:

1. You create an app that is intuitive and simple to use and understand instantly. If it’s a crazy flex app, people won’t use it. If it takes tons of training to figure out, people won’t use it. If you make people work hard or if it takes a long time to get actionable insight to come out the other end, people won’t use it. When people rave about Scout Labs’ ease of use, how intuitive it is, and how much insight they gain for so little work, we are very proud but we are not surprised or amazed. This is what we work at every day. Quick story: A major television network signed up as a customer recently and immediately had dozens of people logged in. When our account team reached out to welcome them and asked if anyone on the team needed a quick training the answer was, “Our team has taken to Scout Labs like fish to water. I can’t imagine needing training but I’ll ask around just in case.” How many other social media monitoring vendors / listening platforms can point to stories like that?



2. You focus on the functionality that the most people need every day to do their jobs better. You give them the insight they need in an easy to digest way and you remove confusing advanced controls (for most). Do people need to see social-graph-visualizations every day to do their jobs? Not very many, so we didn’t start there. If you layer in too much deep-dive researcher functionality, you will baffle the people who need the information the most and who can do the most with it - those on the front-lines.


3. You do NOT charge by seat. Charging by seat just limits the product’s viral potential and its effectiveness in the organization. If you care about teams really uniting around your dashboard, then, instead, you encourage team usage and sharing and find other ways to earn revenue. We choose to charge by the number of things (searches) your extended team tracks / we analyze on your behalf. So, if we are useful and valuable, you will rely on us more and more, and you will pay more.


4. You cherish collaborative interaction by teams and use it to get even smarter! At Scout Labs, we have architected for user feedback loops. As users work with each other and with the data - change a sentiment score, flag something as spam, etc. - we use that feedback as labeled data which can train our algorithms (which are almost all learning and adapting). This gives us a major competitive advantage, because we have thousands of highly motivated, highly skilled Scout Labs users unwittingly “labeling” data for us, which we use to improve algorithms and augment dictionaries and linguistic rules.

All of the above are core tenets of Scout Labs and fundamental to how our platform works and what makes us unique. It’s why Scout Labs is the hands-down platform of choice for extended teams that want to tune in to social media.

(One of the many things) New in this release: Assignments
If you are a customer of Scout Labs, you have a common, voice-of-the-customer dashboard and a common set of social media metrics to navigate by. You have adoption and usage throughout the company, and you have a robust platform for taking action. But you may also need help to NOT trip over yourselves - a way to coordinate your interactions with each other and with your customers. You need “Assignments”, a flexible ticketing and workflow feature which is what has launched today as a feature at the Professional level.

As Scout Labs users know, you have always been able to tag and discuss and route things via email to others on your team, and Standard level plans will have all those same capabilities, but this Pro feature offers:

• A built-in ticketing system so that any piece of content can be assigned to a person, given a status, and tracked by all.
  
• A team control panel showing how well you are doing at responding - # open tickets, # closed tickets, average days to close tickets, etc.
  
• A personal to-do list and stats for your own engagement metrics.

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts
This is not a new idea. Other platforms in our space have a workflow feature, BUT they do not as completely live and breathe collaboration the way Scout Labs does (see above), so the feature’s utility has been limited. If you charge by seat and hence hardly anyone buys additional seats, there’s no one to collaborate with! If the app is difficult to use and thus is mainly used by the one person who had training and can figure the thing out, what’s the point of a ticketing system? Scout Labs did it the other way around. We EARNED the honor of being the voice-of-the-customer dashboard to entire organizations, and now, with “Assignments”, we give our customers even more powerful ways to collaborate, coordinate and take action.

Again, the new Assignments feature in this release is in addition to major new data enhancements that everyone gets access to - lots more forum data, general news sources broken out, richer Twitter data options, and sexy new graphs. Look for a post from Margaret next that will give more detail on those enhancements soon.

Join me on February 17th at 11am PST when I’ll be giving a webinar on the updates we’ve made to the Scout Labs application, our focus on collaboration and what we have coming up for 2010. You won’t want to miss this! Sign up here.

In the mean time, enjoy the new release. Comments welcome!