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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 detailed comparison chart available, but the highlights are that the Professional edition is different from Standard in that it offers log-ins for an unlimited number of users (vs. 5 log-ins in the Standard plan), it sports the new 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

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!

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

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 ;-)

I am thrilled to announce the close of a new round of funding for Scout Labs! Full press release here.

I am happy about the pace at which we’ve been adding new data, features and insight in the last seven months, since launch. (Has it only been just over half a year?! Time flies when you are having fun!) But this new influx of capital will help us go even faster. New data sources, new visualizations and reports, new integrations, new ways to uncover the mind of your market. And until now, our customers have been our ONLY marketing and PR resources. We hope to continue to call you our best evangelists, but we’ll be adding a few more troops to the army.

Of course the big bank account is quite nice, but I am just as excited about the amazing new team of partners that we have gained from El Dorado Ventures and Javelin Venture Partners.

Thank you for making our first seven months so stunningly successful. We promise to keep up our end of the bargain — being the best at finding signals in the noise to help you understand the mind of your market.

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

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….)

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.

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.

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!)