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:

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!

Here at Scout Labs, we know there are some big corporations out there that are still standardized on IE6. We work with some of them, which is why to date we’ve supported IE6. We didn’t want to cut off IE6 users or subject them to a substandard application experience. We know most of them are stuck on IE6 because of IT admins who overinvested in proprietary apps that ONLY work on IE6, have NEVER been updated and never will be, are purposefully holding them back.

But the time has come: Support for IE6 is officially over. Not only is IE6 subpar with respect to speed, stability, and security, it limits the options we have in developing new functionality that relies on more modern, standards based browsers, specifically Javascript dependent interactions. As of our Feb 2010 release, we will finally have hit the wall with IE6: IE6 just doesn’t support the Javascript dependent interactions that our new Assignments functionality, and to a lesser extent upgrades to our graphing and collaboration features, require.

This is a decision point that old skool internet companies like Yahoo and Web 2.0 companies like Facebook and bellwethers in the SAAS space like Salesforce have already gone past. Hell, 37signals phased out IE6 support in October of 2008, which is the Internet equivalent of the Nixon era. Even Europe is following suit. But for those of you still using IE6, here are some options:

• If you have the necessary permissions on your computer, install and use any browser more modern than Internet Explorer 6. You can download Firefox or Chrome for free. As of Feb 2010 Scout Labs officially supports IE7, IE8, Firefox, Safari and Chrome.


• Upgrade to Internet Explorer 7 or 8. Even IE 7 is faster, more reliable, and better supported by Microsoft than IE 6. Though we’d pick IE8 over IE7 any day.


• If you don’t have the necessary permissions on your computer, find the person who does. If they wont help you, send them this link: http://www.ie6nomore.com/ Or this one: http://www.stoplivinginthepast.com/ Or this one, from a Microsoft employee: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/IE6WarningStopLivingInThePastGetOffOfIE6.aspx Or….you get the picture.


• If you are denied permission to upgrade past IE6, go find a company executive who believes in the future. This is a great way for some up-and-comer to make everyone in the company more productive via upgraded internet tools and experiences, and themselves wildly popular (with all non-IT personnel) in the process.
  

The cool part is, now we get to support Chrome- which is a fun browser, and great news for users of Microsoft OS products of a more recent vintage. And for all you network admins who just can’t seem to get everyone off IE6 and Win2000? Better hurry up, before every SAAS app your workforce relies on becomes standard equipment on the corporate smartphone- and no one gives a hoot about that big old box with a ten year old browser on it, anyway.

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.

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!

The Scout Labs application has a whole new look and feel today and it supports an exciting new feature.

New Feature: QUOTES

When you dive into the dashboard of one of your searches today, alongside Sentiment and Graphs and such is a new tab called QUOTES. Scout Labs already give you lots of quantitative metrics to help you measure your brand (buzz is up, positive sentiment is down…) But QUOTES is a little different. Inspired by WeFeelFine (although much harder to execute, because we are looking for opinions and emotions about a particular product or brand), QUOTES offers qualitative insight into the mind of the customer, for companies wanting to know: “What do our customers love, hate, want, think and feel about us right now?”

The QUOTES feature pulls from social media customer opinions and emotions being expressed about any topic. Today, Scout Labs automatically populates QUOTES relevant to the following categories:
• Love: Raves for the product or brand
• Hate: Rants by unhappy customers
• Wish: What customers WISH your company would do, add, change, improve. Feature requests and ideas.
• Compare: Ways that your brand is being considered alongside others. Who’s better than who? What are customers switching to when the abandon you?
• Recommend: When people highly recommend you, what do they say? What’s the favorite thing? What do they recommend you do differently?
• Issues: What problems are customers having with you? What concerns are lingering?
• Caveat: Your brand advocates LOVE your product BUT… (or however….)

You can see how QUOTES turns social media chatter into a live focus group of millions. Scout Labs is already a leader in the use of natural language processing to analyze social media for the world’s best brands. With the addition of QUOTES, we raise the bar and deliver even more insight to the hundreds of marketers, brand managers, product managers, communications professionals and executives who rely on Scout Labs to help them build better products and sell more.

New Design
The changes to the user interface will be apparent as soon as you log in. We really wanted to make it easier to scan through all of your searches and to find your collaborative actions. We also wanted to lay an architectural foundation for new features, new data and new actions that will be coming live shortly. To those ends, we have made the following changes:

• Your list of searches are persistent on all pages now. This will make it easy to jump between searches. You can also choose to sort your searches now by alphabetical order or by the change in buzz. (A nice little touch: if you are looking at Twitter results for one search and you jump to another search, you will go to the Twitter results for the new one. That way you can scan through your searches by media type, now!)
• All team activity (bookmarks, discussions and alerts) are front and center, in the now-persistent left nav. We have added counts, so you know how much team activity is underway.
• Oh, and we made the design look simply AWESOME. We hope you like it.

And since we moved some things on you, here are a few important tips: to create a new search now, hit the little “plus” icon in the left nav next to “Searches”. To manage (delete, edit) your searches, click the “gears” icon in the left nav, right next to the Create a Search icon.

We get feedback all the time that our application is intuitive and easy to use, so we were careful not to mess anything up. Let us know what you think (we know you will!)

Since the Scout Labs application began, we’ve maintained a rapid pace of development for new features. These new features make the application more powerful and usable, but only if they are bug-free. And since the nature of computer programming makes bugs inevitable, we have comprehensive tests to help us catch those bugs and correct them.

Once a new feature or change to an existing feature is completed and deployed to our staging environment, the next step is to write new test scripts to ensure the new functionality behaves as expected. All the older scripts are executed as well to regression test the existing features to make sure they are still functional.

In addition to the Java and Ruby on Rails tests, we do end-user testing. For this we use Selenium Remote Control, an open-source web app testing tool that works in multiple browsers and operating systems. It allows us to test multiple versions of browsers in different operating systems, including Internet Explorer 6 & 7, Firefox 2 & 3 on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Mac OSX Tiger, and Mac OSX Leopard. Selenium also supports Safari; we’ll be adding test environments with that browser soon.

When the Selenium Remote Control (SRC) server is running, it accepts commands from a script to automate browser actions. Anything from clicking a button or link to parsing the HTML on a page can be automated.

Using Selenium and a driver for Ruby, we have created a comprehensive test suite that simulates an end-user browsing the Scout Labs app (albeit at super speed). This way, we can test the functionality of the whole site, from simple to complex:

• Simple: when the app is used to send a blog post email, it should be sent immediately with the correct content.
• Complex: when a user creates a bookmark on a blog post, photo, video, twitter, or comment entry, that bookmark has the correct tags, the correct create date, can only be deleted by the author, and shows up in the correct places (on the entry detail page, on the search result page of the corresponding search, in the bookmark section, under the activity feed of the homepage, and in all other members of that workspace).

If the test suite finds a problem, major or minor, a developer fixes it and the test is rerun. Only when all tests have passed on all browsers in all operating systems is the new version promoted to the public site. This ensures we catch as many bugs as possible so you have a smoother experience in the application.

Of course, no test suite is perfect and Selenium can’t catch all the bugs. If something does break, you will see an error submission form; please fill it out and we will fix it as soon as we can!

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!

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.