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Looking to brush up your skills on search creation, metrics reporting or how to use the newest features in Scout Labs? We’ve got a webinar for you!

We’re announcing four new webinars we’re running each week through March. We’re keeping them small and intimate, so you’ll have the opportunity during the webinar to work one on one with the Scout Labs team to learn tips, tricks and get your burning questions answered. Space is extremely limited so sign up now!

Search Creation Fundamentals Webinar
Mondays 3/8, 3/15, 3/22, 3/29
1:00 - 2:00 pm PST

Creating the proper searches is the cornerstone of social media listening. Search is more than just inputing your company name. In this webinar you’ll learn how to set up your workspace to search for industry trends, competitors, campaigns and uncover the desires, wishes and likes of your customers.

Metrics and Reporting Fundamentals Webinar
Tuesdays 3/9, 3/16, 3/23, 3/30
1:00 - 2:00 pm PST

Uncover quick and easy tips for how to get the most out of Scout Labs reporting features. Learn how to create customized graphs, export data and set up weekly email alerts.

Assignments and Saved Items Webinar
Wednesdays 3/3, 3/10, 3/17, 3/24
1:00 - 2:00 pm PST

Two of the most exciting new features in Scout Labs, Assignment and Saved Items, are critical to organizing your team around social media listening and outreach. Learn how to use these features and see real live examples from some of the world’s biggest brands.

Configuration, Customization and Co-branding
Thursdays 3/11, 3/04, 3/18, 3/25
1:00 - 2:00 pm PST

Agencies, this is for you. If you need to brand a Scout Labs workspace for your clients or create multiple workspaces under one account you’ll learn how easy that is.

And as always, every Tuesday and Thursday at 11am PST we will continue to run our Live Demo. Get an overview of Scout Labs and see how to start your own social media listenting campaign. Sign up here.

We do ask that you register for these events, so to ensure your space, please sign up!

Immediacy Matters in Social Media

New York-based strategic communications firm Fortex Group specializes in public relations, reputation management and business development for a client roster that spans media, technology and health services. Fortex not only delivers client services, but also operates its own community and news properties, such as Play the Music for the digital music industry.

An important part of the firm’s focus on best-practice planning and measurement includes a keen awareness of emerging market data sources and the tools and technologies that put them to good business use.

When social media began to reveal itself as one of the richest sources of market data yet, it came time to start shopping for a social media analysis platform. True to its data-driven nature, the firm explored a number of solutions and in the end became an enthusiastic participant in the Scout Labs Beta program.

“We’re always looking for new tools that are easier and faster—and Scout Labs is one of the easiest and fastest we’ve seen yet,” said Ephraim Cohen, Fortex Founder and Managing Partner.

“Scout Labs data sources are as good or better than any other vendors. On a price to performance basis, Scout Labs is a clear frontrunner—easy to use, easy to set up, very cost effective.”

Fortex Group uses Scout Labs for customer service, brand monitoring, competitive analysis and crisis communications, turning searches on and off around their campaign calendar and using Scout Labs as their primary tracking tool. “Scout Labs is one of the few reports we look at and include in client reports on a daily basis,” said Cohen.

Mr. Cohen cites ease of use, robust data and the clean user interface as among the reasons for his enthusiasm for Scout Labs, but also enjoys its immediacy. Just after the recent, sizeable launch of an iPhone app, the firm was able see results immediately in Scout Labs. “Two days after the launch, we were able to go into Scout Labs, pull charts and quotes, cite metrics and compile a nice visual representation of how the market received the launch.”

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.”