Blog

It’s been a busy summer here at Scout Labs, what with our acquisition by Lithium Technologies and the need to introduce our new colleagues to the best Thai/Indian/Blue Bottle coffee places surrounding the San Francisco office. Today we’re happy to present you with the fruits of our Thai/Indian/Blue Bottle coffee powered development team. The latest enhancements to the Scout Labs application:

1) New interactive query form. A few of the most important changes:
• Edit query terms inline. No more re-typing!
• Select which terms you want sentiment and quotes for- reducing the number of irrelevant quotes and sentiment menu options
• Remove the automatically checked “send me an alert” button which was quite frankly annoying everyone including us
• Drag and drop query terms to reorder them

2) PDF graphs. We’ve restored the option to export graphs as images, in PDF format now instead of PNG. This is a very handy way to get a universally readable/ usable image from a graph without having to take a screen capture. You just insert the PDF into your PPT and you’re good to go.

3) “New Search” button on left sidebar. One of the things we noticed while testing the new search creation form was that users were taking some VERY circuitous routes to create a new search. Though we strive for the minimalist design approach, we can no longer deny that you all need a bigger button with “new search” written on it. You just do. Voila.
4) New graphing controls. Check out this sleek new toolbar. Notice that when you go to “Graphs,” the graph type selected is automatically defaulted into “Volume,” but “Share of Voice” and all the other handy types are still available.

5) Totals on graphs. Notice that the graph key now displays the total mentions for a search. When you focus on the day, the key will show you the mentions per day. The export, of course, contains the graph totals data so you can make your own visualizations.

The new search creation form is going to take some getting used to. Though we’ve embedded some help in the application, we highly recommend that you sign up for one of the special new search creation training sessions, or at least watch the helpful 4 minute video.

We recognize that the search creation form in particular is the hardest part of the application to use. We’ll always be investing time in making it work better for users. Feedback on this release, or any others, can always be directed to our community or sent to us direct via email at support@scoutlabs.com.

Many thanks to the users who helped us refine this release, including Jeff Esposito at Vistaprint, Ankush Karnak at Citibank, Mark Hopkins at Lenovo, Bryan Kristof at The Marketing Agentc, and Eric Walton at GyroHSR. There are some amazing new features on the way for fall, including a release in mid September with Facebook data and some gorgeous new PDF reporting options. If you’d like to be in the test group for these new features, ping us at support@scoutlabs.com. I cannot resist giving you a little sneak peek:

At Web 2.0 New York last fall, our half-day workshop included a “fireside chat” with the wise Peter Kim of the Dachis Group. The topic was the state of the market and how brands are currently using and how they want to be using social media. I asked him a question that I hoped would be a layup —given that Scout Labs got him there on stage in front of hundreds of companies and made him look so good ;-). I asked, “What are you seeing on the social media vendor landscape that’s interesting? How are we doing at meeting companies’ needs?” Again, I thought this was a layup, and that he would answer with glowing words about Scout Labs.

He did glow about Scout Labs, but Kim followed with:

“Actually, the vision of Social CRM is a great one. You have totally sold companies on the idea and they are ready for it. The reality is that you vendors are not delivering on the vision. You are not connecting the social media and customer data dots fast enough for most of the companies I work with.”

Ouch.

But he’s right.

We SAY “customers are everywhere—tune in” but we social media platforms have focused on indexing, measuring and analyzing open social network content. Meanwhile, companies’ on-site customer communities and e-commerce sites are treasure troves of information on their own—game-changers when connected with social media data. But the platforms have not crossed that chasm.

We SAY that you should “know thy customer” but we only give you anonymous social media profile data that is virtually impossible to connect back to your customer lists for marketing, support, sales or REAL campaign ROI. Tech shops are hired to build one-off connectors. Agencies frantically export data, trying and connect the dots in Excel and Google Docs.

We find your influencers—brand advocates and detractors—but only in the channels we track right now. Its kind of like the old joke: Q: Why are you looking for your keys there under the street lamp? I thought you lost them in the bushes?” A: “Well, this is where the light is. We don’t know who’s influential on your site and how they travel, or more importantly, how their influence travels across channels.

Peter Kim is right. We are not going fast enough to meet the market’s seemingly insatiable desire for social media intelligence and customer engagement via the social web.

This is why I am so excited to announce, today, that Scout Labs, the leader in social media measurement and management, is merging with Lithium, the preeminent customer community and Social CRM company. Together, we create a true Social CRM platform with a lens on the whole customer. We have wide social media data. They have deep customer and community data. We help teams connect with social media. They help customers connect with each other.

To our beloved Scout Labs clients, you will not lose a thing. The Scout Labs team, the product, the brand, the culture, the commitment to actionable insight, ease of use and affordability—all are alive and well.

Together with Lithium we have different and complementary pieces of the customer data and analysis puzzle, but we are also very similar!

• We are united by data, data, data.
• We are united by serious IP around analysis and metrics.
• We are united by a passion for both quantitative + qualitative insight for our customers.
• We are united by our unwavering focus on the customer.
• We are united in our desire to be mission-critical across the organization—marketing, sales, community, commerce, support, etc.
• We both define success as delivering real business results across the organization.
• In diligence, we fought over whose customer list was more impressive. Now that we are one, we can honestly say that we (together) are the trusted partner to the world’s best, most customer-obsessed brands.

This combination is all about acceleration. This is about more data for you (data-junkies, we hear you standing and cheering). This is about features that you have been begging for, delivered sooner. This is about (finally!) connecting social media and customer data dots that will change the landscape forever.

To learn more, visit the microsite we’ve created which has much more information about the acquisition. Also, check out this blog post from Lithium CEO, Lyle Fong. Join us for our upcoming webcast on May 19th with Peter Kim, where you can learn more about the acquisition and what we see for the future of social media analytics.

We are looking forward to an exciting 2010 and beyond.

Jenny

With so many vendors selling social media monitoring applications, there’s definitely a sea of choices — some fitting certain companies and needs more than others. So how do you choose? As a vendor, we can run our own review, but that’s not nearly as valuable as an independent review.

That’s why we were thrilled to see, Jeff Esposito’s blog post “Picking a new social media monitoring service”. Jeff’s a PR pro and has done his homework, researching half a dozen vendors.

Jeff embarked on this research while searching for a new vendor. Previously, he’d been spending 10 hours a week manually setting sentiment for his brand with another vendor. Yes, you read that correctly 10 hours a week— and that doesn’t even include diving into competitive data!

Ultimately, Jeff went with Scout Labs for our automated sentiment, collaboration features and his ability to easily research and compare competitors.

One of the takeaways I got from Jeff’s review is how well Scout Labs scales in comparison to many of the other vendors. We offer multiple users from Day 1, unlimited results returned and are so easy of use. Scout Labs is a great (and affordable) choice for everyone from the mom and pop shops to Fortune 100 companies looking to dive deep into industry, brand and competitive analysis.

Don’t forget to check out his post, and while you’re at it, take at look at Jenny’s excellent blog post on Advanced Questions that you Should be Asking your Brand Monitoring Vendor.

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

Looking to brush up your skills on search creation, metrics reporting or how to use the newest features in Scout Labs? We’ve got a webinar for you!

We’re announcing four new webinars we’re running each week through March. We’re keeping them small and intimate, so you’ll have the opportunity during the webinar to work one on one with the Scout Labs team to learn tips, tricks and get your burning questions answered. Space is extremely limited so sign up now!

Search Creation Fundamentals Webinar
Mondays 3/8, 3/15, 3/22, 3/29
1:00 - 2:00 pm PST

Creating the proper searches is the cornerstone of social media listening. Search is more than just inputing your company name. In this webinar you’ll learn how to set up your workspace to search for industry trends, competitors, campaigns and uncover the desires, wishes and likes of your customers.

Metrics and Reporting Fundamentals Webinar
Tuesdays 3/9, 3/16, 3/23, 3/30
1:00 - 2:00 pm PST

Uncover quick and easy tips for how to get the most out of Scout Labs reporting features. Learn how to create customized graphs, export data and set up weekly email alerts.

Assignments and Saved Items Webinar
Wednesdays 3/3, 3/10, 3/17, 3/24
1:00 - 2:00 pm PST

Two of the most exciting new features in Scout Labs, Assignment and Saved Items, are critical to organizing your team around social media listening and outreach. Learn how to use these features and see real live examples from some of the world’s biggest brands.

Configuration, Customization and Co-branding
Thursdays 3/11, 3/04, 3/18, 3/25
1:00 - 2:00 pm PST

Agencies, this is for you. If you need to brand a Scout Labs workspace for your clients or create multiple workspaces under one account you’ll learn how easy that is.

And as always, every Tuesday and Thursday at 11am PST we will continue to run our Live Demo. Get an overview of Scout Labs and see how to start your own social media listenting campaign. Sign up here.

We do ask that you register for these events, so to ensure your space, please sign up!

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!

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 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!

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.