FAQ

Plans and Payment

How does the 30-day free trial work?: Everyone who signs up for Scout Labs gets a 30-day free trial. You do need to give us a valid credit card and agree to be charged if you continue to use the service after the free trial ends. Don’t worry — we’ll email you before we charge you to make sure you’re aware of the free trial end date.; Top
What’s the difference between the Standard and Pro plans?: On the Standard plan you can have 5 concurrent searches running at any given time. On the Pro plan, you can have up to 25. For all plans with multiple workspaces, you get up to 25 concurrent searches. Other than that, both plans offer the same features and unlimited users.; Top
I need more than five workspaces. I have a lot of clients who want their own.: We are delighted to help you! Give us a call at 1-888-620-6220 so we can get you set up with as many as you need. The more workspaces you need, the cheaper each workspace is.; Top
How does monthly billing work?: Once your free trial is over, we will bill you for the first month of service. We’ll continue to bill you in full at the beginning of each service month. We accept Visa, Mastercard and American Express.; Top
Can I pay by PO (purchase order)?: Sure. Contact us at support <at> scoutlabs <dot> com or call us at 1-888-620-6220 to request this option.; Top
Can I pay by PayPal?: Nope. If you really want this option, let us know at support <at> scoutlabs <dot> com so we can prioritize it.; Top
How safe is my credit card information?: Scout Labs’ payment process is PCI DDS compliant (to the October 2008 standard), which is pretty darn safe. The downside of all that security is that your billing information is not available to customer support people at Scout Labs, so if there’s a problem with your card, you’ll need to log in to the application and resubmit your credit card number and expiration date. Please do not email us (or anyone else on the internet) with this information.; Top
How do I upgrade or downgrade my account?: You can upgrade (add workspaces or searches) or downgrade (assuming you’re within the usage limits of the lesser plan) at any time and we will prorate your monthly charge. Only an account admin can upgrade or downgrade the account — if you try but you’re not an admin, you’ll be given the email addresses of the admin(s) on the account who can make the change. If you signed up for the account and submitted payment information, you are the original account admin, but you can designate other users to be admins as well.; Top
How do I cancel my account?: You can cancel at any time from within the application. You will be asked to confirm cancellation, because cancellation is immediate and will delete everything, including your bookmarks, discussions, etc. If you had already prepaid for the month, a prorated refund will be issued to the card on file.; Top
I canceled my account right after you charged me for the month, do I get a refund?: If you had already prepaid for the month, you’ll be charged only for the days you used and a refund for the balance will be automatically issued to the card on file.; Top
I have a billing question/problem. How do I contact you?: Email us at billing <at> scoutlabs <dot> com or call us at 1-888-620-6220. We’re in the office M-F, 10-5p.m. PST. Email is probably best.; Top

Application and Content

What is Scout Labs?

Scout Labs is a powerful, web-based application that finds signals in the noise to help your team build better products and stronger customer relationships.

Scout Labs is a product company, not an agency. We provide cutting-edge technology and a collaborative platform for companies and their agents to listen to customers and engage with them out across the Internet. With Scout Labs, our users:

Know when to tune in and what’s most important to pay attention to
Hear what customers love and hate about brands
Reach out to influential customers to build relationships
Engage in proactive customer service
Let the voice of the customer inspire new product and marketing ideas

Scout Labs has grown significantly since it was founded in 2006. With offices in San Francisco and users all over the world, the company currently employs 10 professionals. Our CEO and product team guide the application with insight from the world of marketing, brand management and product management, but the majority of Scout Labs employees are senior engineers with expertise in search technology, high-performance systems, natural language processing, machine learning, web crawling and data visualization.

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What content can I find in the Scout Labs application?

As of May 2009, Scout Labs indexes:

posts from roughly the top 12 million English language blogs, with a portion of blog comments, news, message boards, social networking sites and classifieds mixed in
comments from about 150,000 sources (soon to increase to millions) including comment systems like Disqus and Intense Debate, answers sites like Mahalo Answers and Yedda, comments from social news sites like Digg, Hacker News and Reddit
photos from 5 web services including Flickr, Picasa, SmugMug, and Zoomr
videos from 10 web services, including YouTube, Vimeo, Veoh, Revver, Metacafe, Heavy, Gamespot, Flickr, and Dailymotion
Twitter

We continue to aggressively add new content types and sources every day.

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What if I want content from a source that isn’t in the application?

You can add URLs to the tool and we’ll try to get them for you. No absolute promises though — we can’t legally crawl protected Facebook and MySpace pages, for instance.

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Do you cover non-English content?

Not at this time, at least not on purpose. Because we do advanced language processing for things like sentiment detection, English is the only language we currently support. Sometimes you will see some non-English items appear; these usually have some English elements, such as being partly written in English, or containing English names/photo labels that fall into a gray-zone, linguistically speaking.

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How real time is real time?

Very. In the case of top blogs (meaning highly trafficked, linked-to blogs) and other websites, content is usually retrieved within the hour or for something less popular, within a couple of hours. For external photo and video sites, access is as fast as their APIs, which are generally as “real time” as their sites are.

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How do alerts work?

You can choose to receive an alert for any search, either daily, weekly or monthly. Alerts include top posts, new words, top positive and negative sentiment items, most recent Tweets, and any group activity within that search — items colleagues bookmarked or discussed, etc. If there isn’t any new content within that time frame you won’t get an alert.

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How do you deal with spam in results?

A couple of ways:

by not including the source at all, which is a noble quest, but never 100% effective, in part because people disagree about what spam is
by identifying it and ranking it lower than legitimate content, which is why you may see spammy results at the bottom of your result set
by letting users identify it and remove it from their results (the little “x” next to a result will make it disappear from your workspace forever). And every result you remove becomes a candidate for training our spam identification algorithms, so remove away.

Voila, you are a force for good in the universe.

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How do I submit my site or blog to be crawled by Scout Labs?

From within the application, simply click on the Suggest a Source link in the footer of each page. If you are not a Scout Labs user, email us at crawler <at> scoutlabs <dot> com.

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What browsers do you support?

Officially, we support Internet Explorer 6 and 7 and Firefox 2 and 3 on a variety of operating systems (Win XP and higher, OSX and higher). If you use Internet Explorer 6, especially an outdated version, some features may not be optimized and your experience may not be as visually pleasing. We develop on Safari, so you should have a good experience on it, but we do not officially support it just yet. Ditto Opera, iPhone and other mobile applications. We’re working on it.

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Support

What kinds of support do you offer?: By Email at support <at> scoutlabs <dot> com, by phone at 1-888-620-6220, or sign up for a free support session (contact form available in the application) and we’ll do your support session via Skype, Video Chat, whatever works for you. We are happy to help you get started, to provide additional training, and answer questions about the application. Feel free to contact us at any time. No charge. Or take a look at the answers on our Support page in the application, or in our Get Satisfaction community.; Top
Your application is nice, but I need to know what to do about the things I find. Can Scout Labs help me?: Scout Labs is a product company that seeks to empower people who deal with social media — at companies, at agencies, wherever they may be. We don’t provide consulting services beyond support for our application. But email us at info <at> scoutlabs <dot> com. We’ll help connect you with one or more social media savvy agencies that know the Scout Labs application and can help meet your needs.; Top
I notice a Scout Labs crawler in the logs for my site. Are you crawling my site?: We’re running an experimental Web crawler to create a searchable index of interesting content. We strive to keep our crawler polite and unobtrusive, but if we’re hammering your site or something else unfriendly, please let us know at crawler <at> scoutlabs <dot> com. If you want to control how our crawler (or most others) access your content, use a robots.txt link on your site.; Top

FAQ

Plans and Payment

Application and Content

Support

Plans and Payment

Application and Content

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