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Immediacy Matters in Social Media

New York-based strategic communications firm Fortex Group specializes in public relations, reputation management and business development for a client roster that spans media, technology and health services. Fortex not only delivers client services, but also operates its own community and news properties, such as Play the Music for the digital music industry.

An important part of the firm’s focus on best-practice planning and measurement includes a keen awareness of emerging market data sources and the tools and technologies that put them to good business use.

When social media began to reveal itself as one of the richest sources of market data yet, it came time to start shopping for a social media analysis platform. True to its data-driven nature, the firm explored a number of solutions and in the end became an enthusiastic participant in the Scout Labs Beta program.

“We’re always looking for new tools that are easier and faster—and Scout Labs is one of the easiest and fastest we’ve seen yet,” said Ephraim Cohen, Fortex Founder and Managing Partner.

“Scout Labs data sources are as good or better than any other vendors. On a price to performance basis, Scout Labs is a clear frontrunner—easy to use, easy to set up, very cost effective.”

Fortex Group uses Scout Labs for customer service, brand monitoring, competitive analysis and crisis communications, turning searches on and off around their campaign calendar and using Scout Labs as their primary tracking tool. “Scout Labs is one of the few reports we look at and include in client reports on a daily basis,” said Cohen.

Mr. Cohen cites ease of use, robust data and the clean user interface as among the reasons for his enthusiasm for Scout Labs, but also enjoys its immediacy. Just after the recent, sizeable launch of an iPhone app, the firm was able see results immediately in Scout Labs. “Two days after the launch, we were able to go into Scout Labs, pull charts and quotes, cite metrics and compile a nice visual representation of how the market received the launch.”

Living in San Francisco we’re surrounded by technological early adopters, so it’s hard to believe that some companies are *still* asking this question, but it’s true.

In response I came across this awesome video from timetogetsocial that helps answer that very question.

If you, or someone you know, is still questioning the usefulness of social media for businesses, I think this video will get you one step closer to understanding its relevance for all businesses. Are you listening?

Right on the heel’s of Margaret’s post about why agencies use Scout Labs, we bring you this case study from NordicClick Interactive.

Mike McAnally is one of the founders of NordicClick, a leading web strategy and interactive marketing agency in the Midwest. Mike helped to build the agency with a strong focus on metrics, A/B testing and optimization for their sizeable roster of clients including large consumer brands and manufacturing clients.

When Mike started steering the agency towards a social media capability, like so many, the team grappled with an unwieldy mix of tracking tools. Cobbling together RSS feeds and Google alerts to harness social media activity across a variety of clients and industries was “terribly messy,” says Mike.

The NordicClick team began actively seeking a single solution that would first give them all the social media data they needed—which in an agency environment can be considerable. NordicClick needed an application that would allow for multiple users and multiple searches across a large client base that covered a dozen or more industries. The social media analysis platform they chose not only needed to be comprehensive, but also needed to help to make their practice more efficient and more effective.

“We weren’t going to make an investment in a social media practice that was just about listening,” Mike says. “Our agency motto is ‘Listen, learn and share’. We needed a platform that would let us learn about a client’s business in meaningful ways and let us share that information easily.”

Mike and his team reviewed several social media analysis platforms, but found them to be “over-engineered.” They were immediately attracted to Scout Labs as “an aggregator of all social media channels”, a collection of data from thousands of sites, but mostly to the fact that his dashboards are organized in intuitive, meaningful ways. “The interface is clean, simple and intuitive and the graphs are perfect for client-facing PowerPoints. We routinely pull screenshots from Scout Labs into our client presentations to demonstrate the insight we’re getting from social media.”

Indeed, NordicClick harvests a great deal of value for their clients from the Scout Labs platform. They routinely use Scout Labs to conduct keyword research, competitive analysis, buzz tracking, SEO audits, sentiment searches, for soft selling customer services and reputation management just to name a few.

Since the agency began using Scout Labs, “we log in at least every day and whenever we get alerts,” says Mike. “Everyone’s been trained on it, our contractors use it. We typically provide monthly and quarterly social media analysis reviews for most if not all of our clients.”

NordicClick’s approach for landing social media strategy business is to sell a social media analysis capability to all of their clients up front. Even if they don’t sign on, the team automatically sets up a workspace for the new client brand, resellers and competitors “so when we open up the workspace and they see the amazing data, the immediately sign on for the value. It’s a no-brainer.”

“I would describe Scout Labs as one big user group,” says Mike. “Excellent value for the money, it’s great for stress-testing all kinds of strategy, from keywords, to Twitter campaigns to PR.”

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 ;-)

There is a lot of confusion out there. Many of the posts and tweets about social media monitoring and brand monitoring these days are asking, “What application should I use? Which app is the best? Who has used what? What do you think?” Very often, the RFPs I receive and the questions I am asked about our platform are pretty surface-skimming. “Does it have Twitter?” is a fine question, but there are so many more tough questions you should be asking all of us.

Don’t even ask me which platform is best. You already know my answer is Scout Labs. I have no credibility there. But, having thought about this and worked on the technology for nearly 3 years, I do think I have credibility in offering up a checklist of things to look for and to think about if you are choosing a social media analysis platform for your company. I will get the list started but I hope that you will add your own thoughts:

1. How many months of live data are you serving in the application? (I need to be able to read all the posts and also see trending graphs).
2. Do you price based on the number of results returned or otherwise limit the number of results that I can see? Or do you return all the search results for my topics?
3. What social media content types do you index?
4. Can I add sources if I don’t see them in your app? How fast does it take to see them in results?
5. How good are your spam filters? What percentage are your algorithms catching as compared to human-scores? How often do you mis-classify something as spam?
6. If you say its spam, can I see what you filtered out? Can I add them back in to my main results?
7. Can I curate the results for my team? E.g. If I think a result is either irrelevant or spam, can I flag it as such and will it be instantly removed from the results?
8. Can I order mentions within a given date range by importance - what’s most important to pay attention to - or is it just by date?
9. What sentiment-related features do you offer? Is it just positive and negative scoring, or can you identify other customer emotions?
10. With regard to sentiment (positive / negative / neutral) how accurate are your sentiment scores? Specifically, how often does your algorithm agree with human scorers? When is the last time you tested your algorithm versus human scores?
11. How are you improving your algorithms over time?
12. Do you do only go-forward sentiment scoring (as posts come in, after you create a search)?
13. Or can you back-fill sentiment scores for old things that were posted before I created my search? If so, is there an addition charge for backfill? How long does it take to back-fill sentiment for all my searches?
14. Does the application support multiple people / departments and groups in the company? Is it easy to add people? How much do you charge additional users or is it free?
15. Is there a way to “bookmark” and tag interesting content as my team finds things and people that we want to remember?
16. Can I annotate things I see with my own commentary and tags, so that my colleagues can see my thoughts?
17. From when a customer posts to when it is live in your application, what is the lag time (by media type)?
18. How long does it take for a dashboard to populate from search creation?
19. Is everything totally automated or do you have your analysts or outsourced labor doing some part of it?
20. How much honing and set-up of the results need to happen to get really good results?
21. How much training time would you say is required to become an expert at using the system?
22. What is the average number of users that are using your platform within a typical company. One? Twenty?
23. How do you price? What’s the cost for an addition person to get access? Is there any limit on the number of search results that you return to me?
24. If you do limit the number of searches that you return to me, (e.g. 10,000) and I do a search on “Google”, say, that clearly has far more than 10,000 results, what do subset do you show me? What am I not seeing?

We don’t mind the softball-inquiries when they are thrown to us. But we know that Scout Labs stands up to very rigorous scrutiny, so bring it on. I hope this makes you a more sophisticated reviewer of platforms and writer of RFPs. I also hope that this forces more data into the discussion about social media platforms and raises the level of discourse throughout the category.