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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.

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!

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

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 ;-)

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 ;-)

What are people twittering about? I’ve been studying sample tweets, looking for clues about how people use Twitter. One thing that’s clear is that lots of people use Twitter to share. All the numbers in this note are based on a sample of around 675,000 tweets, from early June of this year.

Approximately 20% of the tweets contain URLs. That is, one out of 5 says “Look at this! I want to share this with you!” So, what are they sharing? Figuring that out takes a little more work.

Most of those URLs (over 2/3) are shortened by services like bit.ly or tinyurl.com, with bit.ly (over half) the leader. If you start with a URL like http://www.scoutlabs.com/blog/ bit.ly will shorten it to http://bit.ly/OHe48.

That may not look like a big difference, until you remember that tweets are limited to 140 characters.

You might not know you’re using a URL shortener — a Twitter application may do this for you. Paste the shortened URL into your browser (or sometimes just click on it) and your browser will get the original URL from bit.ly and use that to fetch the web page. Or, you can simply ask bit.ly for the original URL. That’s what I did.

Of the URLs shortened by bit.ly, approximately 8% were links to YouTube. Others in the top 10 included blogspot.com, google.com (including Google Maps, Google News and Picasa, along with feedproxy), wordpress.com, nytimes.com, etsy.com, facebook.com, and flickr.com. The results for URLs shortened by tinyurl.com were similar, but they included fewer links to YouTube and Flickr, more links to craigslist.org and job sites.

Some sharing sites automatically generate short URLs — they don’t need bit.ly or tinyurl.com. Over 1 in 20 links in my sample were to twitpic.com, a site devoted to sharing photos via Twitter. About a quarter as many were to blip.fm, a music sharing site. There are a number of smaller sites dedicated to sharing maps, music, photos and video via Twitter.

Given the new integration between Flickr and Twitter I suspect that if I repeated my analysis with newer data, I would see significantly more links to Flickr.

So, what have I learned?

1. People use Twitter to share textual content such as blog posts and news articles.
2. People also use Twitter to share non-text content such as maps, music, photos and video.
3. The links in tweets are a good indication of what people are interested in— right now!
4. Because so many URLs are shortened (using bit.ly, tinyurl.com, etc.) it’s essential to look up original URLs to discover what they’re tweeting about.

I’d be interested in hearing comments and questions, along with any insights you may have about how people are using Twitter.

Image “Tweeties” by Chris Wallace. Licensed under a CC 3.0 License.

Today we have two new features available in the application: six months of data and agency co-branding of workspaces.

Agency co-branding is the ability to add a second logo to the workspace header, with custom text that will appear on the homepage and on click for the second logo. Agencies have been asking for the ability to co-brand the application for clients that they share a workspace with, like so:

This feature will support the addition of any second logo to a workspace, for instance the iPhone group within Apple, or the Basketball team within Nike. Go to the “Settings” tab and note that there are now two slots for uploaded images plus a agency info/custom text field. Just make sure you hit “refresh” after you upload new images to see your new assets in the header. It is possible to format text using basic HTML or the Markdown syntax such as * for italics or ** for bold and to include links in the text field. More detail on how to format the agency info area in our Support section.

Six months of blog data is also now available. We are hearing from all of you that two+ years of data is optimal, to do year over year trending and get a little more history, so expect more data to be made available soon. Sentiment is available only for the past three months. Six month graphs are also available with one caveat: because we are only supporting sentiment on the last 3 months of data, six month sentiment view may flat line more than three months back. If you get more, consider it the gift of an idle 8-core processor!

Next up: Blog comments, one of the two remaining must-have data types (the other is message boards, which won’t be available until summer). Also customizable date ranges for viewing blog data and export of data, both of which have been repeatedly requested by users who want to tailor the view within the application and work with data outside it.

In terms of other major features, we are working hard on full Twitter data, including graphs and frequent word lists. You’ll be able to plug in a search and use more exact search parameters than are supported by search.twitter.com and get trendable graph data, which no one else has. We’ll definitely let you know as soon as that one is ready!

My rocket-obsessed 4-year-old was SO excited that mommy was “launching” Scout Labs last week. He kept asking me if I was going into space. Well, things were ‘getting off the ground’ I guess.

But I couldn’t help but notice on launch day how much it actually felt like Mission Control in the Scout Labs office. I thought I share with you some of the ways we monitored and directed launch day.

Of course, we were logged into our Scout Labs workspace, watching and responding to blogs, tweets, news and comments in real-time. We kept refreshing the page to see the newest posts of the minute, which was easy enough, as we were logged in all day long, but we definitely felt the need to have our aggregated search results available via RSS. (To those of you who have requested it, that is officially prioritized on our roadmap now). From the Scout Labs dashboard, we bookmarked Tweets and posts with tags like influencer, event, launch and feature_idea. We emailed and assigned things to each other, but there was also plenty of “Margaret, will you take that one?” and “Jenny, you on this one?” yelled across the room as well.

Another thing that we are all tuned in to (because it is projected on our wall to a size of about 15-feet square) is a streaming list of real-time searches by users inside our app. Every time a user hits “Save” on a search, we see the search terms requested, how many fractions of a second (or seconds, in a few cases) each search took us to return the data. You can imagine how fun this is to watch - people’s interests flickering on our wall in real-time, sometimes hundreds per minute.

We’ve got application metrics as well, with by account and totals for number of workspaces, users, invites sent, bookmarks created, sentiment values overridden, discussions started, etc. We’ve got back-end monitors for how long sentiment takes to process, how long it takes for features to populate and everything else you can imagine, all wired up to pagers so that we are immediately notified if something goes down or stops working. In fact, the only thing that was uneventful on launch day was our systems! No pagers. No lags. No problems. (OK, I lied. Apologies to Sean Power who was transferred to the SF fire department when Julie tried to transfer him to me! Thanks for calling back, Sean.)

It’s not quite as cool as sending a rocket to space, but a launch of any kind is an amazing thing to be a part of. Especially when you’ve got the right tools in place and a rock star team on the job.

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.

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.