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Being the ROI leader is very important to us. We don’t make the decision to change prices lightly. But we did change them this week for a few reasons. First, we have added a tremendous amount of data and functionality since our launch nearly a year ago! And we continue to make huge investments in technology in order to give you context - to help you know where and when to pay attention. Importance ranking, emerging meme detection, customer quotes extraction, sentiment scoring (that you can override and improve), spam and porn filters, de-duping, beautiful dashboards, etc.

Don’t let the simple, intuitive interface fool you. We do hard, expensive stuff. And the pace will not slow down. As one analyst recently said about us, “You guys are on fire.”

New: Price Increases
Since launch last year, our 5-search plan has been $99 per month. Now the Standard (5 searches) plan is $199 per month. Check out the new prices here. If this sounds steep to you, keep in mind who our competitors are and what their price points are (if you can find them listed somewhere!). Some are tens of thousands per month. Many are in the $500 to $2000 per month range. Even after this price change, we have five options all under $500 per month: $199, $249, $299, $449, $499. All of these plans deliver unlimited search results and support teams of users. Scout Labs still offers the most data and functionality for the least expense. We call that the best ROI in the market.

We do still offer discounts for annual contracts - buy 10 months, get a full year of access (a 17% discount). In fact, those customers currently on pre-paid annual plans have current pricing locked in for the duration of their contracts.

New: Two Plan Levels
Beginning this week, we have two tiers of functionality to choose from - Standard and Professional. There’s a detailed comparison chart available, but the highlights are that the Professional edition is different from Standard in that it offers log-ins for an unlimited number of users (vs. 5 log-ins in the Standard plan), it sports the new Assignments feature, provides 6 months back data and allows for the export of results and underlying graph data.

New: More Choices
We still do not charge by the number of results returned (e.g. $X for up to 10,000 results, with no warning of what the monthly bill will ultimately be). Unlimited results are part of every plan. We still do price by the number of things you want to monitor concurrently - in other words, the total number of searches in use. We used to have a 5-search plan, then a 25-search plan, and then higher. Some customers said 5 was too little and other companies said 25 was too much so we added a 10-search level as well. Now you will have stepping stones that are closer together if and when you need to upgrade.

Scout Labs is not for everyone. But we are the simplest, most intuitive way for teams to measure and manage social media. New users, you should try us and see what you think for yourself, with a 14-day free trial. Existing users on monthly plans, we hope you see the value and we will work with you to make sure we find a new plan tier that works for both your team’s needs and budget. Email support@scoutlabs.com with questions or if you want to lock in current pricing by paying upfront for an annual subscription.

—Jennifer

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!

I am thrilled to announce the close of a new round of funding for Scout Labs! Full press release here.

I am happy about the pace at which we’ve been adding new data, features and insight in the last seven months, since launch. (Has it only been just over half a year?! Time flies when you are having fun!) But this new influx of capital will help us go even faster. New data sources, new visualizations and reports, new integrations, new ways to uncover the mind of your market. And until now, our customers have been our ONLY marketing and PR resources. We hope to continue to call you our best evangelists, but we’ll be adding a few more troops to the army.

Of course the big bank account is quite nice, but I am just as excited about the amazing new team of partners that we have gained from El Dorado Ventures and Javelin Venture Partners.

Thank you for making our first seven months so stunningly successful. We promise to keep up our end of the bargain — being the best at finding signals in the noise to help you understand the mind of your market.

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!)

It is with great sadness that we acknowledge the death of Matt Ericson, one of the Scout Labs software engineers. Matt had been battling cancer since last fall, when he fell acutely and mysteriously ill on a vacation to Europe and very nearly did not make it home to be accurately diagnosed. We were grateful for his survival then, and hopeful that since the type of cancer he had (lymphoma) was a treatable kind, with a high survival rate, that this would be an episode of ill health in an otherwise long and happy life.

Matt died last Thursday at Stanford Hospital, which he had been in and out of for treatment over the last couple months. I’m still in shock. My own mental defenses against the worst outcome are still coming down. Each time I remember they crumble a little further and I cry a little more and think about how an early and untimely death exposes all that’s wrong with the universe, especially when the person in question was so funny, and goofy, and kind, and talented, and in love. At least he had Kristen and he was so very, very happy with her. It shone out of him. Look at him in this hat she knit for him. I love this picture.

Kirsten is organizing a celebration of Matt’s life for June 25 or 26 in San Francisco. The details will be posted on Matt’s blog, http://cancermatt.wordpress.com.

Matt, we miss you so much. Safe travels, brother.

Our dear friend and colleague, Matt Ericson, lost his battle with cancer (Lymphoma) on Thursday.

He was a truly talented engineer and one of the happiest, most optimistic people I have ever met. He will be missed by the entire Scout Labs team. He chronicled the struggle for all of us in his blog, which has updates, now, from his wife Kirsten about the celebration in his honor that will be held later in June.

Matt, we miss you but feel so lucky to have known you.

PS: Please sponsor your ‘Team in Training’ friends or donate directly to the The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.

As Margaret described in her earlier post about Sentiment, our sentiment scores agree with humans about 75% of the time, right out of the gate.

“Is that good enough?” people ask us. “It depends,” is the answer.

It is extremely powerful to have the system score hundreds of thousands of posts in real-time so that you can be alerted to potentially volatile issues and situations without doing any special scoring work yourself. For example, when Netflix logged in earlier this month, (or maybe when they opened their daily email alert from Scout Labs) they saw this data:

Pretty clear that customers were not happy about something on Monday March 30th. Drilling in, Netflix could quickly see that the decision to increase the price of its Blu-Ray DVD rentals was not a popular one! We correctly scored lots of unhappy posts.

We didn’t score every post correctly. I found one post that we scored as negative, based on the following phrase: “Netflix blamed the company for…” We thought it meant that Netflix the company was being blamed, but really it was Netflix doing the blaming. But in aggregate, Netflix gets a very good sense in real-time what customers are thinking, thanks to Scout Labs’ automated sentiment scoring.

And when you care enough to make sentiment the very best, you can always correct or override the sentiment values in the application, which updates the value only for you and your team. If you are an agency (especially PR) this is part of the value that you can provide to your client: getting the sentiment values JUST right. There’s an added benefit to scoring / improving sentiment, as the team at Scout Labs uses those overrides as labeled data sets that we can use to improve our sentiment accuracy rate over time.

So is sentiment scoring at Scout Labs perfect? No. Is it still incredibly powerful and useful in identifying problems? Yes. It acts as an early-warning system and brings very important problems to your attention.

We’ve fielded a lot of great user questions since launch, and the number one area we’ve fielded them in is sentiment. This may be too much information for some of you, but if you really want the details, read on!

The sentiment feature in the Scout Labs application is the ability for the machine to judge whether or not the author of a story is expressing a positive or negative attitude towards a specific word or phrase. For those companies with only a few posts per day that they can judge for themselves, this feature is a nice to have. But for brand and product marketers looking at a significant volume of posts, this feature is essential to understanding changes in consumer opinion.

So how do we do it? How accurate is it? And how should you use it?

How we do it

Scout Labs’ sentiment is “entity specific”. What some products do when they produce “machine generated sentiment” is that they count happy words vs. sad words in a news article. The “tone” of the article is shown by the happy word count. Consider “I love baseball. My happiest memories in life are from sitting in the bleachers at Fenway. It’s the greatest game on earth. But guys like Bonds and A-Rod are bringing it down.” Despite the high “happy” word count, this does not express a positive opinion about Barry Bonds or Alex Rodriguez.

In the Scout Labs application, we don’t count happy words. We evaluate sentiment for each particular word or phrase you search for. We can tell that the sentiment for baseball is positive but negative for Bonds and Rodriguez. This is done via part of speech tagging: parsing the underlying semantic structure of a sentence and determining which emotion words apply to the key word. Emotion words come from dictionaries of standard English words and have been augmented with phrases and slang to better map to the world of social media. So Scout Labs’ sentiment is entity-specific, which is very important.

Scout Labs’ sentiment can be changed by users. We use confidence intervals to decide whether something is positive or negative, but if we get it wrong (more on that below), you can change the score, immediately updating that item for yourself and the rest of your team. Charts and graphs update immediately as well. And the really cool part is that every time a user changes a sentiment value, that item becomes a labeled piece of data that we can use to abstract out additional rules and add words and phrases for our dictionary. So our ability to detect sentiment just gets better over time.

Scout Labs can “backfill” sentiment data for the previous 3 months in less than a day. We have 3 months of live data in our app for our users right now (6 months soon). We can go backward and score all the posts from the last 3 months in less than 24 hours. So you will have complete sentiment trend for everything going forward and going backward within less than a day from creating a search (All other graphs — buzz, share of voice, etc.) are real time and have no lag time at all).

Does it work?

Yes. We have done extensive human vs. machine testing and it’s accurate in the 70-80% range, meaning our algorithm agrees with humans’ scores 70-80% of the time. This is only slightly less than humans agree with each other. Some other insights and findings from our testing:

• College educated people with business experience agree on the sentiment ratings for a blog post about 85% of the time. Using less qualified people, such as you might find in a random Mechanical Turk experiment, produces lower rates of agreement. We were surprised that we couldn’t get that rate higher. Some of the discrepancy stems from the human tendency to equate negative opinions and negative information: “I hate Coke” is a negative opinion; “Merrill Lynch just downgraded Coca-Cola” is negative information.
• The Scout Labs sentiment feature agrees with college educated people about 75% of the time. We try to pad that a little by being conservative about what we call positive or negative — we call things neutral if they’re borderline.
• The Scout Labs sentiment feature sucks at detecting irony and sarcasm. Posts that are heavy on the irony often end up classed as “neutral” because the machine can’t even guess. Consider “Another winner from the almighty Microsoft.” That’s a tough one.
• Machines don’t understand business context. Perhaps you work for Apple and every mention of an unlocked iPhone is negative because people shouldn’t unlock their iPhones. An algorithm that uses grammar and vocabulary based rules cannot classify this post as negative about iPhone: “I love my iphone. My boyfriend unlocked it for me last night.”

So the Sentiment feature produces a pretty good guess, about what you’d get using if you got a half dozen ratings from Mechanical Turk and chose the rating the most humans agreed on. (See this useful paper from the Dolores Labs blog about how to use Mechanical Turk to get reliable human judgments). And our best guess plus your teams’ efforts to quickly change the things we miss or get wrong means really high accuracy levels for you and your team with a minimum amount of work and expense.

How you should use the sentiment feature

• To find the top positive and negative posts. Click on “Sentiment” and filter for positive or negative posts. You’ll get immediate insight into some forceful opinions about what is wrong — or what is right — about the product or brand you are searching for.
• As a starting point for your own sentiment analysis. Any user can change the sentiment rating for any post. If you work for Apple and you want all those unlocked iPhone posts marked “negative,” you can do that. Just click on the sentiment icon and make the change. These changes will carry through to all graph data, so you can create accurate data sets to view in the application or export data for. We use your rating changes as machine learning inputs, but your specific ratings are proprietary and confidential to your workspace.
• To get insight into consumer opinion via alerts. When you set up a daily, weekly or monthly alert for a search, you’ll get buzz, top news, new words, recent tweets, and the top positive and negative posts pushed to your inbox via a text email. It’s a great way to stay informed and know when to invest more attention.
• To compare sentiment between brands or products. Do consumers like Symantec or Norton? The Lebron 6 or the KD1? Embarq or Comcast? Sentiment Trend graphs can help you see trends, spikes, and make comparisons.

We have heard over and over again from our users that an affordable, reliable way to assess sentiment, with user override built in, is critical to getting insight into social media, so we continue to work on this feature. We hope you’ll let us know how you want it to evolve in the future. We’ve already got a slew of new feature requests to work on, including more metrics, visualizations, and customizations. Get your ideas into the mix at support <at> scoutlabs <dot> com.

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.

I’m happy to announce that Scout Labs is open for business today at www.scoutlabs.com.

Our deepest thanks go to our several hundred very savvy beta companies who have been both brutally honest and wonderfully encouraging. We stayed in beta longer than most because we believed that if our product could earn their business, we’d be poised for success. We are proud that many are now clients, so it’s time to launch.

Scout Labs is a web-based app that finds signals in the noise of social media so that companies can build better products and stronger relationships with customers. Everyone seems to be talking about social media analysis these days I’d like to just cut to the chase and tell you what makes us different:

1. Scout Labs is true software to support your own listening efforts. Analyses are automated and real time. We employ no analysts to generate PowerPoint reports. We want to teach you and your extended team to listen — not listen for you.
2. We know that brands are innovated and protected in “packs”, so Scout Labs is for teams. All plans are for unlimited users. And we offer many ways to interact with the data, to add insights, to collaborate with each other, and to engage with customers.
3. We are committed to delivering qualitative insight as well as quantitative metrics. You can use our app to track when buzz goes up and down. But we also want you to understand what the buzz is about. What are customers ranting about? What are they raving about? We use NLP (natural language processing) and other text mining techniques to deliver insight into what customers are saying. Today that means features like automated sentiment detection, conversation digests and the identification of emerging conversations. Tomorrow, that means so much more. But it is our goal and the direction we will continue to push.
4. Thanks to our strong focus on automation and collaboration (and infrastructure that is ready to scale), we offer this advanced suite of analysis tools, including real-time sentiment detection, at a very low price point. All companies need to be listening to and analyzing social media. Now they can afford to.

We think our product speaks for itself, which is why we are offering a 30-day free trial with all plans. Give us a try. Reach out if you need help. Tell us what you think and what you want to see next.

Thank you (and woohoo!) from the entire Scout Labs Team.

Photo source: Mathieu Thouvenin