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It’s been a big year for Scout Labs, and it’s only March. With a big release behind us, we are already working on new features and welcoming new clients. What’s more, we’re heading to Austin, TX for SXSWi. We are practicing what we preach and going where the technology and social media conversations are already taking place, and, in March, that is South by Southwest.

A few of us “Scouts” will be in Austin for SXSWi. You won’t find us manning a booth or hosting any big events, but we want to meet you, so please don’t hesitate to reach out.

Whether you’re interested in a demo or getting your burning questions answered, here’s who you need to meet, tweet and greet:

Erin @erinkoro

Julie @superlativelady

Laura @laurascout

Liza @lizasperling

Margaret @margaretfrancis

And of course, don’t forget about @scoutlabs

We look forward to celebrating the ideas, technology and PEOPLE that make this industry what it is. See you in Austin - Scout’s honor.

Photo courtesy of alicenwondrlnd under the Creative Commons License

Jenny, the CEO of Scout Labs, and I first met while working at an agency (er- it was called marchFIRST), and it was from an agency (Razorfish) that Jenny lured me when she started Scout Labs. So many of the things I wanted to do for my clients I could not efficiently execute, due to lack of tools in market. As a former agency strategist, I have a special affinity for Scout Labs’ agency customers and the use cases they have for our platform. Here are some of the reasons agencies give me for needing a social listening platform:

1. We need to know what is happening with the client’s brand to be effective strategists. Agencies’ stock in trade, especially digital agencies and high end marketing agencies, is that they are better placed than their clients to anticipate trends and craft breakthrough marketing strategies because they have the benefit of cross-company and cross-brand experience. It isn’t possible to maintain that positioning if the account team isn’t up to speed on what’s happening with the client’s brand on Twitter and YouTube, much less their competitors’ brands.
2. We are monitoring a particular campaign. Agencies are often responsible for the design, execution and tracking of marketing campaigns. As the power of social media to reach consumers grows, agencies are more and more interested in tracking campaign performance in this channel- or even in defining campaign success by social media criteria. After all, if your big campaign idea is to let a consumer shoot your Superbowl ad, you might want to know how many people saw it, if the people who saw it liked it, and if so, why. Forwarding around a couple of Google Alerts is just not going to cut it.
3. We are engaged in a social media listening program on behalf of a client. More and more of the agencies I talk to- PR, traditional, digital, media only, creative, branding, SEM, etc- are engaged in retained listening programs on behalf of their clients. These range from pay per tweet to ad hoc studies delivered in PPT for $5-50K to inclusion of social media data in traditional brand health measures for $20K+ to outsourcing response to Twitter and blog mentions and so forth for $100K+ month.


In almost every case, the agencies that we talk to decide that they need to standardize on a single platform that can provide the backbone of their monitoring and measurement program. They may do some additional work to add proprietary or other data, or to produce custom analyses, but there is usually a core content aggregation, analysis, and metrics platform that the agency team can build on.



4. We need a common digital dashboard/ application to share across the company and the agency. A really good agency is often deeply embedded in a client organization, more like an extra arm of the clients’ organization than a “vendor” to it. It’s essential for the holistic team to be able to share a single app for content, analysis, and response.


5. We needed a tool for our own internal research and business development. Sometimes the agency just need to look really smart in a pitch, or to engage in a little research that the client isn’t exactly paying for- yet. Sometimes the agency is in the business of market research, creative development, or even product development- all of which are morphing to account for the rise of social media.

Of course none of those reasons is totally unique to Scout Labs, nor is Scout Labs the only solution in market. I see agencies using everything from free tools like Google Alerts to other agencies to help them address these use cases. Here are some of the reasons I see agencies embracing Scout Labs:

1. Easy to use for the whole team. We get consistent feedback that Scout Labs is the easiest, most intuitive, user friendly application out there, for newbies and veterans. If you’re trying to drive social media awareness throughout a Fortune 1000, you need an application that the masses can use. A lone specialist does not organizational change create.
2. Ad hoc search. None of this advance commitment to a lone word or phrase- “Neutrogena”- and only that word, for which data begins accumulating when you contract for it. Agencies not only need data now, they need some trend on it- and who wants to wait 6 months for 6 months back data? And what if that initial scan turns up issues around self-tanning or an ingredient like pomegranate? Agencies need to see trends and data on those, too.
3. Real time market intelligence. People are flabbergasted at how fast it is get data across across all social media channels. Especially people who have used other platforms that have a lag to their data collection. Being able to not just retrieve the data fast, but get speedy analysis of it- frequent words, back sentiment, 6 month graphs- likewise gratifies the time starved agency strategist.
4. Saved items, graphs, and exports. So your deliverable needs to be on the agency PPT template/ HTML email/ Flash presentation. We understand. Scout Labs make it easy to do things like export graph data so you can make the line in the graph your client’s exact brand color, or add your client’s logo and your agency’s logo to the application header.
5. ROI! Having relatively low price points and plans with unlimited users makes this the biggest no-brainer purchase of the year. Go check out prices and see. With Scout Labs you get the productivity boost of a dozen interns for the cost of less than one, just on the content aggregation side- before you even get into metrics and insight from our NLP driven features that no intern is going to provide.

This isn’t a complete list of either use cases or reasons to choose Scout Labs, but it’s getting to be a long post. I’m always open to hearing from agencies about what they need to be more effective on behalf of their clients. Please share it- you might get pleasantly surprised by what we have in development for you.

For those of you that are simply interested in getting a better idea of what Scout Labs is, and would like to see it live before making the choice to sign up, we are offering a daily demo (roughly 30 minutes), at 11:00am PST Tuesdays and Thursdays.

During each session, you will get the back story of what Scout Labs is all about; What we do and how we do it, and also a demonstration of the application.

We believe that Scout Labs is so easy to use, that anyone can dive in and start using the app, without our help. Usually, that is the case. But we’ve also heard that people really benefit from a product walk through where they can see the big picture. During the demo, we’ll address questions like: How are different businesses using Scout Labs? What are the core functionalities? and How is Scout Labs different from other applications out there?

Anybody can join a session - prospective or existing customers. Please register here for the Scout Labs Live Demo - there are sessions scheduled every Tuesday and Thursday so that you can chose which day works best for you.

More importantly, we THANK YOU for your interest in Scout Labs - and look forward to getting to know you too.

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 ;-)

A reporter asked me a few days ago if I believe that traditional branding (TV ads, billboards, logos) is dead, to be replaced by conversations. Scout Labs is called a “new marketing” platform, and in fact, money for Scout Labs often comes from traditional marketing budgets. So you might expect me to be on the “traditional branding is dead” bandwagon.

But I’m not.

Humans are wired to be receptive to branding. In fact, the brain reacts in a unique way when it spots a famous brand name, according to some research. Consumers reading a brand name do not treat it like any other word — instead they activate parts of the brain normally used to process emotions, one study claims. We literally have an emotional connection to brands. And advertisements (done well) are stories, told around the flickering, mesmerizing light of the modern-day-campfire called television. We love stories. We always have and we always will.

If you want to now just how primal and powerful branding is for humans, look to children and the ease with which they swim in the vast branding sea. From the Institute of National Media and the Family, children as young as age three recognize brand logos (Fischer, 1991), with brand loyalty influence starting at age two (McNeal, 1992).

Now, my children are a tad more ad-savvy than most children. They don’t watch TV much (just movies) but I talk to them about marketing and encourage them to be conscious advertising targets. They talk about ads and marketing quite often, but this was a particularly fruitful weekend.

Saturday, Rowan (age 4) and I headed to our favorite Santa Cruz News Café on Mission Street for some hot tea and conversation with the locals and their dogs. Mission Street is the commercial district of Highway 1, so lots of trucks inch by the Café, which Rowan loves. Usually he points out wheels and axles and engines, but yesterday he had brands on the brain.

“Look mom, a turkey truck!” I looked up and had no idea what he was referring to. All I saw was a huge COLUMBUS (the salami) logo on the side of a delivery truck.

Then it dawned on me: “Rowan, did you remember that logo from the turkey we get at Trader Joes?”
“Yeah!” said Rowan.

Then a FedEx truck came by, idling as it waited for the green light. “Do you see the white arrow mom?” Rowan pointed. Many in the branding circles know of the brilliant, hidden arrow in the FedEx logo. I didn’t know 4 year old were primed to spot it. But I guess they are.


(It may be that his reading skills are not that strong yet so he looks at a logo and sees colors and shapes - not words, but still, it was pretty remarkable.)

Then, later that night, the whole family (dog included) piled into the truck with bikes and helmets in tow and headed off to Happy Valley School where the kids could ride bikes on flat, open pavement until dark and Sam and I could sit and talk between wipe-outs. En route, Fiona looked out the back window and saw a grey Audi following us. She immediately said, “Ah, those guys saw the commercial and got that car.”

“What commercial? What car?” I asked.

“They saw the commercial that says, ‘if you have an old house that isn’t that cool, kind of like Great Grandmas, then you should change your house and make it more like Auntie Jesse’s or our house. And once you change your house, you should change your dog and get a better dog. And then once you’ve changed your house and your dog, then you gotta change your car.’ So they must have fixed up their house, then got that car.”

Anyone who watched the opening ceremonies of the Olympics knows exactly what she’s talking about:

And she’s probably pretty accurate!

Jott Networks operates a voice to text service that helps users capture notes, set reminders and calendar appointments, and interact with web sites and services. Since fall of 2008, the company had been offering both free and paid service levels to users, with about 30% of users converting from the free to the paid service.

In January 2009, Jott announced an end to its free service and the introduction of a new voicemail to text service. Jott has an active community of users who blog and tweet about the convenience and ease of the service and the company was not expecting all of them to welcome the news. As an internet startup, the marketing team is small and Doug Aley, the VP of Marketing, was handling public perception of the announcement and launch pretty much solo:

“We have a small marketing team here at Jott, which makes it all the more important to have efficiency tools like Scout Labs to manage web communications. Making sure we are on the pulse of what our customers are saying helps us be more responsive in everything we do, from product development to pricing.” — Doug Aley - VP Marketing and Business Development, Jott Networks, Inc.

Scout Labs helped Jott to find all the mentions of Jott that came up during the critical time period, prioritize items for response, and track which posts had been responded to. The Scout Labs application is still helping Jott do the work of converting users of a free service to paying customers by helping them find instances of social media they need to respond to. Jott also continues to use Scout Labs to monitor key competitors and provide insight into the personal productivity and voice to text space.

It’s been been less than 24 hours since the most exciting Superbowl game in recent history has ended, and buzz is off the charts for the Steelers — and the Cardinals — and Santonio Holmes — and Larry Fitzerald. Looking at the graphs, you can barely tell who even won:

This kind of buzz is great if you’re a smaller brand and you bought that spot specifically to drive awareness — look at Cash4Gold:

But while graphs and charts can do a good job of event detection — something happened! — they don’t give brand or product managers insight into what, exactly, just happened, or inform what they should do about it. There’s no doubt that major marketing events like superbowl ads have some, perhaps enduring, perhaps fleeting, influence on brand perception. Witness responses to the Doritos ad from Twitter:

@dmgerbino Are you not “aware” of Doritos? What about launching new flavors or packaging, some reason to buy?

I have watched the doritos crystal ball commercial like 5 times now but I still won’t buy chips.

Or GoDaddy, which so alienated both male and female customers that by midnight Sunday their one competitor was offering a “DumpGoDaddy” coupon to anyone who wanted to switch hosting companies, and that competitors 1and1 and Register are getting awareness bumps:

@kdpaine oppty for someone to provide a classy, female friendly web host alternative to GoDaddy I’d switch now.

Whatever the fallout from the Superbowl ad spot, it’s the flavor acquired over time that lingers on the palate. Think about Steelers fans. I dare you to walk into the Steelers bar in your city or town (and chances are that you already know which one it is) and talk smack about Roethlisberger or Holmes. At any point in the next 25 years. You do not, if you follow sports AT ALL, need to know that this would be a bad idea. I could almost hear them in Florida from here in San Francisco. Yeah their buzz is up- the most Superbowl wins ever!- but the basic Steelers identity remains unchanged: tough, blue collar, fanatic, an American legacy, the beloved flagship franchise of benighted post-industrial Pittsburgh. That’s the Steelers brand. Never seen an ad about it.

For those professionals who need to manage their brands and companies in the everyday, in the here and now, with few Superbowl moments to provide glory, there aren’t always cues that say “Look here. Look at me now. Pay attention to my opinions” and if there are, they’re likely to be PR disasters (how familiar were you with the Peanut Corporation of America before the salmonella outbreak?). The best way to do conversational marketing, to mine the world of consumer opinion and stay on top of customer zeitgeist, is not to be event driven. It’s to be everyday insight driven. A smattering of relevant blogs and tweets for Superbowl advertisers:

i just saw a kid crush up 2 bags of doritos and pour them over his salad.

Nice, gas light just came on at 450 miles on the tank! #hyundai

Toyota working on solar-powered cars. Will it work in Seattle? Doubtful.

How much more interesting than ad ranking is the insight that people smash up Doritos and use them as toppings on other foods? Could that become a product extension or a marketing campagn? How interesting that people are noticing miles per tank for their cars — talk about a viral promotion idea! How interesting that there are doubts about the efficacy of solar powered vehicles in cloudy climates. Is this a real product deficiency or a marketing challenge? These are the customer insights, this is the context that product people and marketing people and customer service people need to have in order to understand, to evolve, to compete. In marketing, every day is game day.

Hello. My name is Julie. I recently joined the Customer Support team at Scout Labs. I am very excited to be here, as I feel this product has incredible potential. (Obviously, otherwise I wouldn’t be here!) A reminder to current beta users: feel free to send any questions or comments you may have about Scout Labs to me at beta scoutlabs com, as I am here to help you get the most out of using the app. To those of
you who have requested access and are still waiting, we will be extending access to you soon! It’s a promise.

I also look forward to blogging about interesting events in the social media monitoring space. So I just had to post about ‘Motrin Moms’ — the most recent ‘big story’ of corporate
social-media-mismanagement.

Motrin ran an ad
online and in print this fall regarding ‘baby wearing’, which is a term for carrying a baby in a sling, BabyBjorn, or one of those backpack-type devices. The ad claims that it is painful for moms to carry babies this way, and reminds moms that Motrin can help relieve
the pain. I’m not a mom, so I do not really know how offensive this could be, but apparently, it was REALLY offensive to A LOT of moms. They banded together with brute 2.0 force, and within days of the ad being aired, there were droves of moms Twittering and Blogging and Vlogging in outrage. Motrin, slow in their response, did not even acknowledge the movement until weeks later. When they did notice, they had no choice but to take the ad offline, but not before serious brand damage was done. They probably lost a lot of current customers, and more importantly, future customers. Mothers, being the major purchasers within households, are not a good group to alienate. (After all, that
was why they created the ad in the first place - to try and “connect” with this valuable market segment.) AdAge did a great job covering the episode, here.

This is a great example of why a service like Scout Labs should be mandatory for any company putting messages out in to the world. It is essential to put out these fires before they get out of control.

No one within range of a TV, radio or computer could have missed seeing recent news about last week’s vicious paramilitary attacks on civilians throughout Mumbai. There was a great deal of footage from the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, which as one of Mumbai’s flagship luxury hotels was targeted for attack as a symbol of India’s amicable relationship with the modern (and Western) world. I took a look at the most frequent words appearing in a Taj Hotels search today and found:

• Terrorists
• Hostages
• Attacks
• Police
• Armed
• Killed
• Gunmen
• Fire
• Dead

How sad. The top words pre-attack were:

• India
• Indian
• Luxury
• Mumbai
• Hotel
• Business
• Guests
• Palace
• New

Taj Hotels has put up a special site with press releases, contacts, and help for guests- phone numbers to call, a procedure for retrieving bags, priority service for getting back passports. There are also denials of employee involvement, blustery statements about rebuilding, and promises to take care of employees who were injured in the attack or are out of work as a result of it. No one could reasonably have expected to defend a bustling luxury hotel in a peaceful civil society from a full scale military attack. Nevertheless the Taj group is going to have to spend a lot of time and money dealing with the impact to the operations and to their brand.

I wonder if they realize that one of the best ways for them to acknowledge and cope with this tragedy are to let their affected guests, employees, and employee’s families testify as to what went on in the hotel during the attack — and how the Taj Group handled them afterwards. If they can exemplify the values of compassion, service, and dignity, this tragedy need not be the swansong for this landmark hotel.

The global economy is in something much bigger than a “slump”. Consumers (wisely) aren’t spending, so company revenues are plummeting. But despite this very clear reality, and many indicators that this will last for quite some time, I am still reading calls to marketers to NOT cut spending. Of course, these pleas come from advertising firm execs.

The primary rationale given is the old: if you invest while everyone else cuts spend, you will gain share. “My tip for advertisers is to be bold and maintain your spend if you can. That way, you will increase your share of voice as your competitors reduce theirs,” says Guy Phillipson, chief executive, Internet Advertising Bureau. Well, you won’t necessarily gain share, so that strategy a pretty big gamble unless you are sitting on a whole lot of cash. And most of the examples cited by proponents of the “spend more” strategy (Heinz in 2001, Hersey this year) are actually examples of portfolio companies with multiple brands (or markets) who increased spend on a few flagship brands (or markets) while sacrificing the budgets of others. I see those as examples of overall cost decreases and tough decision-making, not permission to spend like crazy.

Then there’s the argument: well, it just kinda makes sense. “You
still need to advertise. Consumers are still living and breathing and they still need to buy products,” says Brendan Condon, managing director, international, Platform-A (a “one-stop advertising shop” by AOL).

Puleeze. If your revenues are dropping, your costs should drop too. That means think critically about every marketing dollar you spend, and maybe even change up your strategy for revenue creation:

1. Make sure that demand creation / acquisition is really the right place to invest right now. To hit your revenue targets, you could pour money into getting more people into the marketing funnel. But would your money be better spent this year investing more heavily in improving the product, thereby improving your conversion rate among the people who come and try? Here’s one prescient advertising exec that I do agree with — David Roddick, commercial director, Northcliffe Media, who said, “Make sure you’re absolutely focused on delivering value and then that you are maintaining your audiences,”
2. Make the most of the customers you have. You already did the hard (and expensive) work of winning them as customers. Consider investing in loyalty programs and cross-sell / up-sell initiatives.
3. Insist on doing more with less. Look for lower-cost marketing solutions and hunt for advertising bargains. Consider bringing in-house functions that you used to outsource. Marketing doesn’t have to be expensive to be effective.

Skyrocketing oil prices earlier this year caused a massive shift in consumer behavior (driving less and buying fewer Hummers) that was extremely rapid and likely permanent. If we marketers are forced to get smarter about how we spend marketing money and start building better products, there is at least a silver lining to this recession.