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!

The iPad has made quite a splash, another announcement from Apple creating buzz and curiosity from gurus and Apple fans alike. Here at Scout Labs, we love this kind of stuff. We scouted over 25,000 blog posts with the word “iPad,” just on 1/27/10 alone. That’s about .7% of the entire blogosphere, trumping the State of the Union in both volume and share of voice. While there were undoubtedly mixed reviews, the overall sentiment analysis goes to positive with about 1000 posts trending positive and about 320 trending negative. It will be interesting to watch these numbers as people keep talking about it and the iPad is actually released.

A few graphs from my Scout Labs workspace:

The whole world is talking about it - so we thought we’d dig into the conversation a bit. The conversations are across the board - the iPad name, functionality, accessories and competition. Pretty interesting to see how these topics compare to each other.

Functionality wins for Share of Voice with the main themes being developers, apps, connectivity and the overall “reader” feature. It didn’t take long for accessories to get into the mix - Griffin, Apple, Belkin, and messenger bag designer Tom Bihn all announcing iPad must have’s. While the name iPad is a only 3% of the initial share of voice, its being called everything from questionable to terrible to baneful. Ouch. A few other quotes we found:

The competition is getting some buzz - about 13% of the iPad conversation. Amazon, HP, Dell, Barnes and Noble and Acer all have products on the tablet and reader market or will be entering soon. There’s no question that Apple has expanded the tablet market and they have the added advantage of buzz. Everyone’s talking about it and no one has spent a dime yet.

The pundits, gurus and late night talk show hosts might have a field day with the iPad name but something tells me that Apple doesn’t mind one bit and will be the one laughing all the way to the bank, even if their stock price is a little bit down today.

@erinkoro / erin at scoutlabs dot com

Here at Scout Labs, we know there are some big corporations out there that are still standardized on IE6. We work with some of them, which is why to date we’ve supported IE6. We didn’t want to cut off IE6 users or subject them to a substandard application experience. We know most of them are stuck on IE6 because of IT admins who overinvested in proprietary apps that ONLY work on IE6, have NEVER been updated and never will be, are purposefully holding them back.

But the time has come: Support for IE6 is officially over. Not only is IE6 subpar with respect to speed, stability, and security, it limits the options we have in developing new functionality that relies on more modern, standards based browsers, specifically Javascript dependent interactions. As of our Feb 2010 release, we will finally have hit the wall with IE6: IE6 just doesn’t support the Javascript dependent interactions that our new Assignments functionality, and to a lesser extent upgrades to our graphing and collaboration features, require.

This is a decision point that old skool internet companies like Yahoo and Web 2.0 companies like Facebook and bellwethers in the SAAS space like Salesforce have already gone past. Hell, 37signals phased out IE6 support in October of 2008, which is the Internet equivalent of the Nixon era. Even Europe is following suit. But for those of you still using IE6, here are some options:

• If you have the necessary permissions on your computer, install and use any browser more modern than Internet Explorer 6. You can download Firefox or Chrome for free. As of Feb 2010 Scout Labs officially supports IE7, IE8, Firefox, Safari and Chrome.


• Upgrade to Internet Explorer 7 or 8. Even IE 7 is faster, more reliable, and better supported by Microsoft than IE 6. Though we’d pick IE8 over IE7 any day.


• If you don’t have the necessary permissions on your computer, find the person who does. If they wont help you, send them this link: http://www.ie6nomore.com/ Or this one: http://www.stoplivinginthepast.com/ Or this one, from a Microsoft employee: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/IE6WarningStopLivingInThePastGetOffOfIE6.aspx Or….you get the picture.


• If you are denied permission to upgrade past IE6, go find a company executive who believes in the future. This is a great way for some up-and-comer to make everyone in the company more productive via upgraded internet tools and experiences, and themselves wildly popular (with all non-IT personnel) in the process.
  

The cool part is, now we get to support Chrome- which is a fun browser, and great news for users of Microsoft OS products of a more recent vintage. And for all you network admins who just can’t seem to get everyone off IE6 and Win2000? Better hurry up, before every SAAS app your workforce relies on becomes standard equipment on the corporate smartphone- and no one gives a hoot about that big old box with a ten year old browser on it, anyway.

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.

There will be even more great new features coming out in the New Year. Bring on 2010!

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 ;-)

We heard a tweet on the wire about Raphaël.js back in October. An open-source javascript library that abstracts vector drawing and animation across web browsers. The demoes show beautiful, fast, interactive graphics. Support for more computer platforms than Flash. Inspiring!

So, we began an experiment here at the labs to replace our static image graphs with dynamic, clickable visualizations, built on open internet standards (and Microsoft’s proprietary VML).

Could it work? Would it explode IE6?

Blog volume: San Francisco Bay Bridge

Those peaks in volume are Cracked I-beam Discovered on Bay Bridge and then Bay Bridge Closed After Crack Repair Fails.

Blog volume comparison: SF coffee scene

Blue Bottle Coffee, Ritual Coffee, Four Barrel Coffee, Sightglass Coffee

Hot browser abstraction action

Raphaël exposes simple Javascript constructs of circles, rectangles, paths with bezier control points, and text, along with ways to animate movement, color, opacity… With these ingredients, painting a picture through code, Raphaël generates open/free/standard SVG markup for Firefox and Safari, switching to VML output for Windows Internet Explorer.

Elder Firefox 2 is our only real casualty; the SVG support is nonexistant in that faithful dog. We fondly scoot along the three of you still on Firefox 2, toward Firefox 3.5.

So, yes, they’re here. All Scout Labs workspaces now have these interactive graphs.

Last Thursday I spoke on a panel at BlogWorldExpo (#bwe09) entitled “Social Secure-ity: Managing Your Brand’s Online Reputation.” Audience questions drove the discussion; I managed to jot down some of the audience questions/ panelist responses and have compiled them below. In my role at Scout Labs, I have seen a wide range of corporate responses to these questions, as I’m sure had the other panel participants- Connie Bensen of Techrigy, Amber Naslund http://altitudebranding.com/ of Radian6, Melyssa Plunkett-Gomez of Crimson Hexagon, and Aubrey Podolsky of Sysomos.

Thinking back on it later in the day, a lot of this advice just isn’t useful with some resources and corporate commitment to social media- and from the tone of many of the questions, resources and commitment are still an issue. There’s no doubt that social media is here to stay whether or not companies want to “formulate a response.” The real question is which companies are going to recognize that better understanding their customers through social media is a source of competitive advantage- whether they decide to turn Twitter into a customer service channel or not.

From a travel industry representative from Las Vegas: How should we deal with negative criticism? How should we respond to it?

• There will always be negative criticism. Develop a framework for what you need to respond to from a business perspective, and try not the take the rest too personally.


• There are trolls and there are people with genuine issues. You can’t please the trolls, so don’t try.


• Your social media presence can and should be about more than damage control to the brand.


• Let the community respond on your behalf.


• Get ahead of the negative criticism- change the business so that consumers aren’t complaining!

David Spinks, a community manager, asked about the importance of responding to content on sidewiki:

• The sources of feedback are multiplying and will continue to do so. Very few brand manager have the time to respond to every single last comment anyone has ever made on any platform. If Sidewiki gets more traction in the market, vendors like the ones on the panel will eventually help marketers figure out how to track and respond to it. Right now it’s a small blip on a crowded radar screen.

A gentleman who works for a hedge fund asked what to when everyone hates you:

• Having a social media presence can help humanize the brand or the industry, and demystify what it is that hedge funds do for the economy


• Whose opinion are you trying to influence, and why? Make sure you know and have the resources to follow through before you set your social media strategy- there are some inconsistent, useless attempts at building a community out there, and they’re not helping the brands they represent


• If you do something for your community that does not directly serve your own interest- for instance publishing free analyst repots- it build brand goodwill


• If they care enough to hate you, they may care enough to love you. There are things the company does that would help them to love you. Make people aware of them.

Kat French asked for thoughts on what to do about clients who only focus on the negative:

• Reframe the conversation through competitive analyses- what do people love or hate about your competitors? It’s myopic to only focus on the negative posts about your own brand


• Another way to reframe is to focus on the positive- what is it that customers like about the brand? What strengths can the brand build on? This is the long term strategic response to negative feedback- not just a crisis communications plan

Tracy Schmidt from ChicagoNow asked a question about policies for employee participation in social media:

• Have a policy in place helps guide employee behavior- and know that there will still be problems. Be prepared to deal with them as decisively as any other personnel problem


• Employees are trusted to have email addresses and phones- they are already representing the company. Employee behavior is a hiring and training issue, not a social media issue. If an employee can’t be trusted, they can’t be trusted


• Employee trust is an enormous issue for every organization. Social media is forcing massive organizational changes on companies, ones that are really challenging for managers and employees. This is a big change for everyone involved and training is crucial.

Last was a great question on how to deal with franchises, where much feedback comes about individual franchisees that impacts the overall brand:

• Monitoring customer satisfaction/ ability to meet corporate requirements is already a part of franchising. Extending that to social media will become a corporate function.

And Lacey Kemp from Seattle, I got your name but not your question- ask it again here and I’ll do my best to answer you!

I found it encouraging that there were a fair number of B2B marketers at the session- leveraging social media is just as crucial for them as it is for the B2C brands, if not more so, and they rarely get the same level of media love.

Some other memorable sessions at BlogWorldExpo were the ROI smackdown- very smart thinking and good examples from Deb Micek, Rob Kay, Beth Harte, and Stephanie Agresta- and the Real Time Web session from the ever thoughtful Louis Grey. The sessions were all taped and will theoretically available online at the conference site but I don’t see the links up yet. Much thanks to Jason Falls for organizing.

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.

New Palette: The first and most visible change you’ll see when you next login is a much lighter design palette. We pulled back on the darker background in part because we’re working on some new search dashboards that really require more whitespace to breathe. Stay tuned for more visual tweaks and dashboard enhancements!

Folders for Searches: We have had a lot of user requests for better ways to organize quantities of searches, so we’ve provided a way to easily group searches into folders and navigate between them. You can create and name a folder, then drag and drop searches into and out of it. Here’s how to get started: Go to the Manage Searches page by clicking the starburst icon at the top right corner of the left nav.

You can create a folder by clicking on the “New Folder” link at the top of the page. Once you create and name a folder, you can drag existing searches into and out of it. Just grab a search and drag it to the folder you want to place it in, or drag it all the way to the left to pull it out of a folder altogether.

My favorite part is that once you’ve set up folders and sorted some searches into them, you can collapse and expand the folders into the left nav to browse. This feature makes it really easy to browse lists of searches and get to all your content fast. The collapse and expand state of the left nav isn’t something you have to set up on Manage Searches page, you can just collapse and expand at will.

A couple notes:

• The buzz value that is shown for a folder is the highest buzz value for any search in that folder. That way you can see if there’s something going on within a folder that you might want to expand and check out. Take a look at the buzz on Eric Munson- pretty much what you’d expect when someone gets called up out of the minors!


• Folders can be deleted, whether they contain searches or not (you’ll be warned if they do) but they cannot be renamed.


• You can’t drag and drop in the left nav itself, only on the Manage Searches page.


• When you create or edit a search, you can’t specify the folder to drop it into- you have to drag and drop it on the Manage Searches page to move it around.

Those improvements will have to wait for another, later release. If you have other suggestions or comments, we’d love to hear them! Leave a comment here or in our GetSatisfaction forum.