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:

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.

We heard a tweet on the wire about Raphaël.js back in October. An open-source javascript library that abstracts vector drawing and animation across web browsers. The demoes show beautiful, fast, interactive graphics. Support for more computer platforms than Flash. Inspiring!

So, we began an experiment here at the labs to replace our static image graphs with dynamic, clickable visualizations, built on open internet standards (and Microsoft’s proprietary VML).

Could it work? Would it explode IE6?

Blog volume: San Francisco Bay Bridge

Those peaks in volume are Cracked I-beam Discovered on Bay Bridge and then Bay Bridge Closed After Crack Repair Fails.

Blog volume comparison: SF coffee scene

Blue Bottle Coffee, Ritual Coffee, Four Barrel Coffee, Sightglass Coffee

Hot browser abstraction action

Raphaël exposes simple Javascript constructs of circles, rectangles, paths with bezier control points, and text, along with ways to animate movement, color, opacity… With these ingredients, painting a picture through code, Raphaël generates open/free/standard SVG markup for Firefox and Safari, switching to VML output for Windows Internet Explorer.

Elder Firefox 2 is our only real casualty; the SVG support is nonexistant in that faithful dog. We fondly scoot along the three of you still on Firefox 2, toward Firefox 3.5.

So, yes, they’re here. All Scout Labs workspaces now have these interactive graphs.

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!)