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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.

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!

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.

March Madness has arrived, and my workplace productivity is already suffering a little (sorry Jenny — I promise I’ll get all my stuff done). I’ve started working on my bracket and looking around the Internetz for a little help. I don’t know whether to trust the wisdom of crowds, the experts or my own careful analysis. There are resources on the web to support each of these strategies, and I thought I’d write up a quick survey…

Crowdsourcing your picks

Yahoo Sports has a new application called the “Team Ranker” that’s sort of like a Hot-or-Not for evaluating possible matchups. The theory is that the masses will collectively gravitate toward the most likely outcome. The obvious risk is that the Team Ranker application might be dominated by people who know nothing about college basketball and make their picks more or less at random. Fanboys might be a problem too. Duke, for example, has a lot of haters, so no matter how viable a contender they might be, I would worry about people expressing their desires (e.g. for Duke to lose) instead of their predictions. Finally, the official tournament seeds and rankings are themselves driven - in a way and in part - by a collection of opinions, so even if Yahoo’s Team Ranker is dominated by true college basketball aficionados, I would expect the results to follow the seeds.

Turning to the Experts

I’ve done well with this strategy in past tournaments, but it’s not a sure bet. Ttaken as a whole, the experts tend to follow the seedings, and they inevitably split on all the toss-up games, so you still have to use your gut to a certain extent. The other challenge is that the expert commentary you can find is pretty disjointed. There are a lot of bits and pieces out there - separate breakdowns by region and conference, lots of hypothetical head-to-head matchups and riffs on narrow subjects like “injuries to watch - so it’s difficult to synthesize it into any kind of cohesive set of picks. That said, the free resources I tend to look at are the obvious ones:

• CBS Sportsline
• ESPN
• Sports Illustrated
• The Sporting News
• College Hoops Net

Each of these sites has its stable of pundits who crank out a furious stream of blog posts and articles between the time the field of 64 is announced and the first tip-off. The trick is to sift through the noise and spot the nuggets that can help you. Most of all, I look for predictions - especially whole brackets.

DIY Analysis

This is an especially rich area this year, and I found a number of nifty online tools. One called Bracket Brains lets you dive deep into individual matchups. If you pay them $15, you can save your work, and you get a bunch of other features, but the free version gives you a taste. Matchup by matchup, it provides a whole range of parameters you can tinker with to help you make your picks.

You can adjust how you think various slices of things like recent performance, strength of schedule and Vegas spread will factor in to each matchup. You can look at similar matchups from past tournaments (based on the parameters you set). You can even view a map showing the distance each team will travel to the game venue. As you tinker with all these parameters, the projected outcome of the matchup in question changes in real time.

Another tool called Bracket Caster runs simulations based on each team’s past performance and calculated chances of winning against any other team. According to the description, every possible tournament game has been simulated one play at a time and repeated 10,000 times. Using this data, you can run your own simulations of the regional brackets, or look at a high-level analysis of any individual matchup.

Finally, March Madness is fertile territory for stat-obsessed geeks. One category of basketball statistics - efficiency - has become especially popular as a way to measure any team’s true merit and predict its performance in future games.

A team’s offensive efficiency is defined simply as points scored per 100 possessions. Defensive efficiency is points allowed per 100 possessions. Defining a “possession” is somewhat more complicated, and I’ll spare you the details (go here if you’re interested). A Sports Illustrated blogger named Luke Winn has produced a compelling examination of just how good a predictor efficiency is, which is nicely summed up as follows: “From 2004-07, only two teams outside the top 49 in defensive efficiency made the Elite Eight, and zero teams outside the top 25 made the Final Four.”

OK, back to work now.

The other day an analyst asked me about the different ways companies use Scout Labs-why they start using it, and all the ways they end up using it. It got me thinking about the evolution I see when companies decide to use a service to help them tune in to customers across the Internet. In fact, it reminds me Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. In 1943, Abraham Maslow developed his Hierarchy of Needs, a theory to explain human behavior. Maslow suggested that psychological needs are hierarchical, and you can’t move up the pyramid until the underlying psychological needs are met. Many have since challenged his strict hierarchy, pointing out several exceptions to the rule. But as a pop-culture metaphor, it helps describe the various ways companies use Scout Labs.

Here is Scout Labs’ version of the Hierarchy of Needs:

1. Find and fight fires (or CYA)
Many organizations get interested in consumer-generated media (CGM for short) because they want to find fires - exploding laptops, rants from prominent bloggers, a rumor leak, a copyright violation - and fight them as quickly as possible. This is an absolutely essential use of a service like Scout Labs, and the reason why whatever service you select needs to:

• Be real-time (so you can find those fires as they happen).
• Find the fires for you, prioritizing what’s important / worth paying attention to right now.
• Have email alerts built in.
• Help you quickly act mobilize your response.

In this day of highly vocal customers who areconnected to each other real-time and whose seething blog posts about you can show up within the first few results on Google, companies worry about the sheer volume of CGM and their lack of visibility into it. There are huge dollars at stake. Finding and fighting fires is a fundamental reason to Scout the Internet, and one that your organization has to feel comfortable with. This means you need to have confidence not only in the tool you use, but in your team’s judgment and ability to take action in time of threat.

2. Seek out product and marketing feedback

Once an organization gets good at finding and fighting fires, we see them start to listen even more closely to what customers are saying. Rather than only monitoring a few, huge problems and trying to solve them, companies start listening every day for insight they can use to improve products and marketing. What do customers like? What don’t they like? Why don’t they like it? What do people wish we would do differently? Scout Labs makes it easy to answer these questions. When a company evolves to the point where it really listens to customers in this way, we typically see corporate communications /PR, brand managers, product managers, and marketing folks all using Scout Labs together to helpbuild better products, inspired by the voice of the people.

3. Build relationships with customers
Only after a company is a good listener can it jump in and start building relationships with customers. I think of it like a game of jump rope. The customer conversation has its rhythm, pattern and players, and you don’t want to barge right in before getting the lay of the land — you’ll just get all tangled up. (Scout Labs lore: at one point we toyed with the idea of naming the company Double Dutch!) Watch for a while. Learn who the key influencers are. Get a feel for the language, the concerns, the issues. And when you’re ready, jump in. Be part of the conversation. Answer questions, ask questions, inform the best you can.

And if you have a service like Scout Labs that helps you facilitate this engagement — communicate with each other about it. Keep a record of it so that you have organizational memory around it. Track the impact of these customer connections. At that point your organization will be able to build relationships with customers on a mass scale. It’s not easy to evolve to this place. You have to really understand your customers and their communities before you can be welcomed in. AND you have to trust your employees to have these conversations and build these relationships. But if you can get there, the rewards are great.

4. Be a customer-centric organization
The apex for an individual, according to Maslow, is self-actualization -making the most of your abilities and striving to be the best you can be. For an organization that wants to listen to customers, the pinnacle is being a truly customer-centric organization. For a company at this stage of evolution, customers are partners. Listening to customers and engaging with them to build better products and sell more is a strategic priority and part of a company’s culture. Everyone - from the CEO to customer service reps - is tuned in to what customers are talking about, coming up with new, customer-inspired ideas, jumping into conversations to build relationships, and truly innovating.

Being a customer-centric organization is more than a nice-sounding aspiration. We believe it’s a strategic competitive advantage. Whoever listens better, innovates faster, and builds personal relationships with customers wins.

digg labs launched “pics” today as a new way to explore images that are submitted or dugg. It’s more of an exploration tool than a visualization, and there are a lot of duplicates for some reason. Still, it’s always fun to see what those guys cook up.

The interesting thing about data is not the “what.” It’s the “so what?”

As a case in point, this graph shows US government spending on document shredding contracts, which amounted to $452,807 in 2000 and ballooned to $2.9 million in 2006.

Now, one could suppose that the cost of shredding has skyrocketed. Maybe the shredding workers unionized for higher salaries and company cars. From the data alone, you couldn’t rule this out.

Of course we know enough about the current political climate to understand what’s really behind the data.

For more, visit usapending.gov, the government’s brand new and utterly fascinating database of federal spending.

One of our favorite muses, Jonathan Harris, just launched a new piece of visual storytelling and infoplay called The Whale Hunt. Here are a couple of snippets from his artist’s statement (hyperlinks his):

In May 2007, I spent nine days living with a family of Inupiat Eskimos in Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost settlement in the United States…

I documented the entire experience with a plodding sequence of 3,214 photographs, beginning with the taxi ride to Newark airport, and ending with the butchering of the second whale, seven days later. The photographs were taken at five-minute intervals, even while sleeping (using a chronometer), establishing a constant “photographic heartbeat”. In moments of high adrenaline, this photographic heartbeat would quicken (to a maximum rate of 37 pictures in five minutes while the first whale was being cut up), mimicking the changing pace of my own heartbeat.

The results are beautiful, and like his other projects, he doesn’t expect you to passively watch. The Whale Hunt lets you experience the photographs as a straight slide show, but he’s also organized the whole experience across a few different dimensions.

You can constrain your experience of the story by any combination of cast member, concept (blood, buildings, prayer, sleep…), context or cadence (measured in photos per five-minute interval).

The photos themselves are rich and gorgeous, and the glimpse into this thousand-year-old Inupiat tradition is simply wonderful.

I recently re-watched YouTube founders Chad Hurley & Steve Chen interviewed by Chris Anderson from Wired at the Commonwealth Club (5/23/07). Watch the Video. It’s fun to hear about the dinner party where the idea was born (once again, they had a personal need that wasn’t being met — to share home-made videos with friends). They also talk about the early days of the company and how the rapid growth of the site caught them completely off guard. My favorite is a story they tell about an early functionality planning meeting, when they rejected the idea of needing any search functionality on the site. They really could not imagine their little “YouTube” ever hosting more videos than could fit on the first page.

Now this may be just good story-telling. I’m sure if you ask the Sequoia Capital folks who funded YouTube, they certainly expected the site to need search! But I love this story because you can make guesses about how users will use new product, you can even ask them how they will use it, but you never really know until you get it in their hands. Scout Labs has been working with many companies since day one. They’ve told us what they need, they’ve reviewed wire-frames, they’ve prioritized functionality, and told us how they thought they would use it. But now that they have a real live application in their hands, they are using Scout Labs for all sorts of things that we (or they) never imagined. They are loving some things that they were mildly excited aboout before, and of course, now they have a million more feature requests. But this is the fun part of building new products and why it is so important to let your customers be your guide. We’ll be doing just that for the next several months, prior to launch.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has posted a few examples of social networks, visualized. One is from University of Michigan (yay!) and another is from Nielsen Buzz Metrics. They sure make pretty patterns, but as a marketer, I still can’t figure out what to do with them. Obviously, influence and linking behaviors are important to track (as Scout Labs does), but for me, a list of the most linked-to, or most influential blogs is much more useful. I’d love to have a map of a single post/story/meme and how it spreads over time, but the time-lapse element is the crucial one, there — something that these examples don’t seem to have. But I welcome your thoughts. Besides trying to look impressive, what do these fancy, all encompassing maps of linking behavior in the blogosphere help you do? Take a look Here.